Summer follies

Sitting on anthills, throwing boots, competitive sauna bathing, carrying your wife through an obstacle course - would you call these things sports? According to Finns, they are.

The best place to start telling the story of Finland’s strange summer sports is the same as for any other story about Finnishness: the sauna. In 2010, the World Sauna Championships were organized for the twelfth and final time. After six minutes, the competition was stopped and the organizers removed the disoriented finalists, Russia’s Vladimir Ladyzhenskiy and

Finland’s Timo Kaukonen, from the sauna. Both were suffering severe burns, and Ladyzhenskiy died at the scene despite efforts to resuscitate him. Kaukonen suffered burns over 70 percent of his body and was in a coma for two months but survived. Today, Kaukonen is back to sauna bathing.

Jari “Lyde” Lyytikäinen’s attempt to set a world record for standing in a swamp nearly ended as tragically. Lyytikäinen, who calls himself a life artist, was caught off guard by the powerful suction of a bog hole, and only the quick reaction of his assistants saved him. “When I realized what sort of bog hole it was, I thought I was done for,” Lyytikäinen said later in a TV interview on MTV3.

Lyytikäinen has had more success with sitting on an anthill and in a freezer – both sports of their own. The world record for the former stands at a respectable five hours. “These are one-time deals. Once you’ve done it, you don’t really want to do it again. You’re competing with yourself there. The result is the reward,” Lyytikäinen said.

Both Lyytikäinen and Kaukonen represent traditional Finnish unyielding heroism. They’re like the beloved character Lieutenant Koskela from the classic Finnish war novel The Unknown Soldier, who is said to “eat iron and shit chains.”

An even closer point of comparison could be the world-famous Finnish stunt group the Dudesons. This is how the audience was warned about the group’s activities in the opening credits of the TV series Dudesons in America: “Most of the stunts in the series are dangerous and stupid. The Dudesons are professionals and jerks. Don't try to imitate anything you see on the show.”

Many other FinniSh summer sports don’t dive as deep into the dark heart of toxic masculinity – they’re simply weird. The most famous around the world is probably wife-carrying. World championships in the sport have been held annually in Sonkajärvi since 1992, though they were cancelled during the coronavirus pandemic. The idea of the sport is to carry a woman who weighs at least 49 kilograms through a 253.5-meter obstacle course as quickly as possible.

At best, representatives from 15 different countries have participated in the championship, and wife-carrying differs from sports like boot-throwing or sitting on an anthill in that it’s not a given that the winner will be a Finn. The two most recent victories have gone to Lithuania, and the world record in the sport is held by Estonians. It speaks to the wide interest in the sport that in 2005, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman attended the championships to try it out. He didn’t participate in the actual competition, however, citing health problems.

Although many Finnish summer sports seem as if they were invented while solidly drunk, to freely quote Shakespeare, “there’s always a method in Finnish madness.” Considering the weirdness of the competitions, their rules are surprisingly precise. For example,

Why do PeoPle participate in these strange sports? The most cynical explanation is that since Finns are no longer successful in their old favorite sport, athletics, they’ve been forced to come up with new sports that other countries don’t want to or can’t be bothered to participate in. Perhaps it can be taken as evidence of this that boot-throwing uses the same runway as the javelin, whose globalization has drastically reduced Finland’s chances of success (in the past, the only people who seriously trained in javelin were the Finns and one Norwegian).

Another possible explanation is that it’s simply so boring in the Finnish countryside that people have to come up with something to do. This theory is supported by the fact that the sports described here are specifically rural amusements: tourists in Finland’s largest cities don’t need to dodge flying boots or fear bumping into someone sitting pantless on an anthill in the park.

The reasons are of course also related to economics and image. The competitions are held in small towns, and without the Wife Carrying World Championships, Sonkajärvi (population 3,768) couldn’t dream of holding a summer event that would attract over 3,000 spectators or be featured as a humorous kicker story on TV news and sports programs abroad. The visibility record for Finnish summer sports was probably achieved in 2004, when the Japanese television company Nippon Network made a documentary about the World Sauna Championships, which was seen by a whopping 40 million viewers in Japan alone.

A third explanation is based on Finns’ unique national character, the core of which is the world-famous Finnish sisu (sitting on an anthill is certainly not very hygge). Here’s how journalist Heini Kilpamäki describes it in her book Suomalaisen tyhmyyden ylistys (In praise of Finnish stupidity): “Even today, Finns are portrayed as wild and raw – and what could be better for the image and brand factories? Being wild seems rugged in an otherwise bland world. A slight feeling of danger has always been intriguing.”

Kilpamäki describes stupidity as an unconventional energy that results in new ideas and breaks free from familiar patterns: “Stupidity steps off the trail to find new paths. As the ancient philosopher Heraclitus said, madness is the source of wisdom.” s