Two Tuomas have given top performances for Coach of the Year, but is only one of them eligible? Tuomas Sammelvuo’s silence about Russia’s military actions is embarrassing, writes Pekka Holopainen.
Pekka Holopainen Sports journalist
When sami Hyypiä was called Coach of the Year 2012 at the Sports Gala, the then head coach of Bundesliga Bayer Leverkusen even got annoyed. Hyypia considered himself to be only a student of his profession, and his position in the coaching world was not cemented. The years proved that Hyypia was as good a predictor as he was a reader of the trajectories of centering balls sent into the penalty area.
There was no reason for such modesty when the volleyball totem Tuomas Sammelvuo got wet in the rain of awards for his feats in 2021. The man who had marinated in the toughest places of the very head coach-led Team Game for eight years had coached the Russian Olympic team to within a few points of gold in Tokyo in the summer of 2021.
At the time of the sports gala at the beginning of 2022, the head coach of Zenit St. Petersburg was negotiating an extension contract with Russia for the Paris Olympic Games 2024, and Tokyo’s final opponent France was also interested in the Finn. Repeating the men’s volleyball gold is the host country’s main goals in the home games, and the thought of a Finnish expert as the guarantor of the dream was downright dizzying.
Sammelvuo was also praised by the undersigned of all time as a Finnish coach.
Let’s jump forward from those fairy-tale views and atmospheres, to the spring of 2023, and assume that a large percentage of readers know what has happened between Russia and Ukraine since the end of February 2022.
A strong mood charge
Just over a week ago, Sammelvuo joined the small group whose members have won the volleyball Champions League as both a player and a head coach, when Zaksa Kedzierzyn-Kozle beat another Polish team in the Turin final.
The head coach was very emotional after the match. The past 15 months have been an emotionally difficult time – which was undoubtedly also influenced by Sammelvuo’s own choices.
A week before Sammelvuo blew up a bank in Turin, Tuomas Iisalon coached by Telekom Baskets Bonn sensationally won the world’s second most important ball sport, the basketball Champions League, in Malaga.
Vesa, who comes from a family of war heroes, started coaching in the same year, 2014, when Sammelvuo already led the Finnish national team to 9th place in the World Championships and confirmed his first Coach of the Year selection.
The highest peak
The Champions League is the highest level of volleyball. The sport is very European-oriented, and at the club level, you can’t beat a bigger vertical.
Above the Champions League achieved by Iisalo, there are at least two higher categories: the Euroleague of Europe’s top teams, which broke away from the international association, and of course the biggest one, the NBA.
By absolute sports standards, Sammelvuo would be ahead. But after the events following Russia’s brutal war of aggression – or rather the lack of events – one has to ask whether Iisalo would really be the only politically hygienic choice of the two, at the moment.
It is a cold fact that Sammelvuo, who received a blessing from the Poles who have an extreme attitude towards Russia, is no longer the same man with a reputation in Finland as he was on February 23, 2022. His choices are widely admired.
Of course, he left Zenit after the start of the war and was in a contract-free state with the Russian Federation, but the media silence in the spring of 2022 screamed in falsetto. The news agency Ria Novosti reported last July the president Vladimir Putin who awarded Sammelvuo the Medal of Friendship, the highest possible recognition awarded to a foreigner.
Sammelvuo finally appeared on ‘s Urheiluhullut program on May 23, 2022 to justify his choices, such as his stay in Russia for the first spring of the war. He does not want to take a public stance on the war, Russia’s actions or Ukraine’s suffering. The subject is embarrassing.
Of course, this can work, but at a certain price, as Sammelvuo knows as a smart man.
Pekka Holopainen
The author is a columnist based in Pori and the only sports reporter who has been selected as Journalist of the Year in Finland.
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