It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. High school was over and finally Viivi Lehikoinen was able to put one hundred percent into the hurdles.
But there was no development. On the contrary, his results and characteristics went in the wrong direction.
As a high school student, he had won gold in the under-18 European Championships and the Youth Olympic Festival (EYOF).
At the age of 20, he was in his third season as a full-time athlete, but his times in the 400-meter hurdles were a couple of seconds lower than three years earlier.
In the eyes of many, Viivi Lehikoinen was fast becoming another lost promise. The athlete’s own thoughts also began to flow in the same direction.
– There have been moments when I have thought that nothing will come of this, Lehikoinen says in the Sportliv program.
Watch Sportliv’s mini doc Viivi Lehikoinen:
– Those were really difficult years. I thought maybe I should do something else. That I should invest my whole life in this one thing, one lap of the track.
Now 23-year-old Viivi Lehikoinen is the holder of the Finnish record, one of the sharpest in Europe, in the fenced track lap.
The difficulties started as soon as Lehikoinen received his high school diploma and after he became a professional athlete: – I was really alone a lot. Nothing came of it.
In Finland, there was no systematic national team activity in long fences, and no suitable training group could be found. Lehikoinen lived in Helsinki, while the coach lived in Pori.
When the corona pandemic hit, the situation became even more difficult. The 2020 season went completely under the bench, and Viivi Lehikoinen’s career was at a turning point.
Lehikoinen had to break the negative cycle. Instead of quitting, he decided to rethink his entire operating environment. He needed a change.
– My situation was so bad that I thought it was all or nothing. Either it goes down the drain or it becomes a huge success.
The new environment pulled to the surface
Lehikoinen had a clear idea about who his future coach should be. Laurent Meuwly coached a sprinter in those days Hanna-Maari Latvala (now Päkk), from whom Lehikoinen got the Swiss coach’s contact information.
Lehikoinen did not receive a reply to his first email, but persistent work brought results and in December 2020 he had a new coach.
Due to the pandemic, cooperation was initially handled remotely, but at Meuwly’s request Mikael Ylöstalo was recruited to supervise Lehikoinen’s exercises on site. The runner from Helsinki no longer had to train alone.
At the same time, the career took off. In the summer of 2021, the results were three seconds better than the previous year, and last season Lehikoinen already undershot Tuija Helanderin A 35-year-old Finnish record. In the World Championships, he advanced to the semi-finals, in the European Championships to the final.
In a couple of years, more than two seconds had disappeared from the record and Viivi Lehikoinen finally began to redeem the inflated expectations of the golden junior years.
Under Meuwly, Lehikoinen jumped from a “lost promise” to the top of Europe.
– The training program alone does not explain the rise, but also the environment in which I can do sports, both in Finland and abroad.
After the corona restrictions eased, Lehikoinen has been able to train more and more under the watchful eye of Dutch national team coach Meuwly since the 2021-2022 training season.
There, the group of training buddies includes, among others Femke Bol. Last year’s three-time European champion ran the 400-meter world record in the winter and is the summer’s number one in the 400-meter hurdles with his European record of 51.45.
In Holland, Lehikoinen has been able to follow a different kind of top sports culture from a close distance.
There, promising track and field athletes follow a clear path upwards. They move to the Papendal training center at a young age, get a coach, follow a carefully planned path forward, and after reaching the top, fully investing in sports is a self-evident choice.
In Finland, Lehikoinen has not experienced the same attitude.
– In Finland, you have to fight a really big battle with yourself, whether you seriously want to choose a top sport, says Lehikoinen.
– Sometimes it even feels unfair that, for example, Femke’s path has been made so easy. In a way, everything is already thought out and he has only been able to step into that professional sports life. An athlete’s career has been made something to really strive for.
Lehikoinen feels that in Finland he has had to explain why he does not study or work in addition to his sports career.
– I still get to answer a lot of questions about whether you do something else besides sports. That you probably have something else in life now.
Especially during the first, tough seasons as a professional athlete, he felt the need to justify his choice.
– When there were difficult years, I felt a really big pressure that I now had to do something else. Otherwise, I’m not part of this society when I’m not studying or working. That is, real work.
He partly understands the wonder of outsiders, especially in those years when he had no results to justify focusing on sports. On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to understand that the Finnish Olympic Committee is on the same lines in his opinion.
– On the website of the Olympic Committee, it says that the starting point of Finnish sports is that you can strongly combine a dual career, i.e. studying or working, with sports.
Lehikoinen says that studying and working can act as a counterweight for some, and it is important to highlight the dual career as an option. At the same time, he stresses that the focus should always be on the needs of each individual athlete.
– I think it’s pretty cool that the Olympic Committee’s greetings to the athletes is that it’s considered a good thing that you can strongly combine many different things. If the appreciation of professional sports is that in the biggest organization of Finnish elite sports, I think we are already in a bit of a strange situation.
The Olympic Committee responds to criticism
In the Finnish Olympic Committee, a top sports coordinator responds to Viivi Lehikoinen’s criticism Juha Dahlström. He regrets the image created for Lehikoinen, which according to him is no longer quite true.
– It’s a shame that it has turned out this way. This may be because our dual career thinking is so young. This has not yet been in the public eye in that way, says Dahlström.
According to him, the dual career sled of the Olympic Committee has recently turned, or at least corrected its direction. For a long time, the idea was that a dual career means combining sports and studying or other work.
– At some point, here in Finland, we started to think that we need to more strongly include sports as a profession as one dual career model. We have felt more and more strongly that the work of an athlete is responsible work.
If you compare to the beginning of the 90s, there is a huge difference in how sports are seen as an acceptable profession.
Juha Dahlström
Dahlström states that while an athlete competes, trains and builds his own career, he also learns a lot of useful skills outside of sports that can be used in later working life.
– Now let’s think about Viiv. At the moment, he is on assignment abroad all the time, he has people from different countries as colleagues and supervisors. It’s an amazing place to learn and accumulate skills that you can then use in your next passion.
The Olympic Committee’s focus is on gathering information about the possibilities of a dual career and the importance of a post-career plan.
– Through dual-career thinking, the aim is to tackle the old challenges in Finnish sports, that the athlete is left with nothing after the career.
Dahlström shares Lehikoinen’s wish that the Finnish sports culture would develop and that the appreciation for professional athletes would grow.
– If you compare to the beginning of the 90s, there is a huge difference in how sports are seen as an acceptable profession. But it still requires a lot of work so that we know how to support in the right way, especially a young athlete who is still on his way to the top, who would like to choose sports as his first profession right after secondary school.
Viivi Lehikoinen built his path himself through his own activity, and he is not alone among top Finnish elite athletes. Lehikoinen cites Finland’s four European Championship medalists from last year as examples.
– I think they have had a bit of an unnecessarily long road to the top. The most important question for me is what could be done to make the path from a promising young athlete to the international top of adults shorter, says Lehikoinen.
Juha Dahlström knows that the management of Finnish athletics has looked more at models based on cooperation and clear career paths. However, the plans have not progressed very far.
– Even in Finland, efforts have been made to find models where athletes would always have others to train with, so that positive competition would arise. But as I understand it, in athletics, we have a long tradition that when reaching the top, everyone builds their own path.