Discover the legends of athletics in our monthly feature On the Shoulders of Giants.
Paavo Nurmi
One of the Great Flying Finns, Pavvo Nurmi still holds the record for winning the most Athletics Olympic medals, nine gold and three silver. Five gold medals at the ‘24 Paris Olympics alone. He was the first superstar of athletics. A generational athlete who operated at a completely different level to his peers.
Paavo Nurmi grew up in Turku in the southwest of Finland and began running at the age of ten. By eleven he was running the 1500m in a time of 5:02. During his childhood, Nurmi’s family endured a series of tragedies. Nurmi’s father died in 1910 and his sister a year later. At the age of 12, he left school to help provide for the family. His mother worked on a building site and Nurmi himself endeavoured to hold down various odd jobs, balancing this with minding his younger siblings. These commitments meant Nurmi had very little time for running until he joined the army years later.
The difficult years undoubtedly had a profound effect on the young man and his approach to life. For one thing, Nurmi had developed a strength, a hardcore spirit, a determination born from years of hardship, hard labour and journeys trudging through snow, ice and freezing winds. When Nurmi was 15, Hannes Kolehmainen, the first Flying Finn took Gold at the Stockholm Olympics and catapulted athletics and long distance running to the forefront of Finnish culture. Nurmi saw in athletics a way out of the dire economic and social situation his family were in.
Once in the army Nurmi was able to concentrate on building his fitness and focusing on his running. He was implementing training approaches and race strategies that moved beyond the amateur to a level of professionalism that had never been seen before. Performances in athletics at that time were dictated by talent alone, the plucky amateur was celebrated, and it was deemed too professional to concentrate your efforts on training. In this staunchly amateur era, someone who took this approach was seen as overstepping the mark, it was in fact largely considered to be cheating. However, Nurmi was keen to develop on the ‘approach’ of Kolehmainen and the wider Finnish distance running scene, which was breaking from the general amateur view, and like them he wanted to maximise his talent and find ways to train in a more professional way.
Alongside his training base workouts, Nurmi used to wait until darkness to hit the streets of Turku, where he raced trams in an effort to build his mileage. Long before the era of jogging arrived in the late 1960s/70s, it was pretty unusual to see a person running around a town or over country roads, in fact you would be considered rather odd if you ran anywhere.
Paavo Nurmi was incredibly methodical, he left nothing to chance. He trained and raced with a stopwatch in his hand and what was witnessed on race day had been repeated countless times in training. Although completely normal now, this approach was radical for its time. Famously he even replicated his Olympic 1500m, 5000m double run with the same time duration between efforts at the Finnish Olympic trials, while everyone predicted the feat to be impossible, Nurmi had already proved to himself that it was well within his capabilities, breaking the world record in both events.
It was at the Paris Olympics in 1924 where Nurmi cemented his legacy. Between 8 July and the 13 July, Nurmi won five gold medals in the 1500m, 5000m, 3000m Team Race, Individual Cross Country and Team Cross Country. The 1500m and 5000m golds were won just 60 minutes apart, while the Cross Country victory, the last time the event was held at the Olympics, was particularly impressive. Ran during a heatwave where the temperatures soared to 45 degrees, just 15 of the 38-man field completed the race and 8 were carried away on stretchers at the end. The stories of the nearby factories that spewed poisonous gases, and the many tales of how athletes were severely affected by heat stroke add to the near mythical quality of the event. Nurmi won with 1 minute 24 seconds to spare over the silver medallist, and the British athlete Guy Butler wrote ‘Nurmi looked as fresh as if he’d just completed one of his training spins in the shade of the Finnish forests but others staggered to the finish’.
Nurmi was an enigma, he shared very little, rarely spoke to press or mixed with fellow athletes. Many of his competitors were beaten before the starting gun had ever been fired. Nurmi’s stern expressionless face, his cold distant stare and robotically consistent laps, along with his supreme conditioning led to an air of invincibility. After the Olympics Nurmi travelled to the US where he ran 55 races, losing just once. It was a tour that is rumoured to have been very financially beneficial, though it would have been all brown envelopes and hushed exchanges during this amateur period.
Through his career, Nurmi set 22 world records and over his 14 years of running at the highest level he remained unbeaten at Cross-Country and over the 10,000m distance. Long before Eliud Kipchoge had declared ‘no human is limited’, Nurmi had questioned our limitations. In an interview shortly after his retirement where he reflected on his athletic career Nurmi stated that there were ‘neither unbeatable records nor human limits.’ That philosophy was one that perfectly epitomised the Great Flying Finn.
Tadhg Crowley
12 March 2023