Sports | The athletes were divided into different competition villages and the meetings were monitored – Helsinki organized the first global Olympic Games 70 years ago

“The Olympics in history, the saying will be used about these games: Those well-organized games”, said the Swedish president of the International Olympic Committee Johannes Sigfrid Edström declaring the Helsinki Olympics closed on August 3, 1952.

Finland, which had dreamed of the Olympic Games for a long time, had organized an unprecedented major event after the difficult years after the war in a way that pleased the international audience as well as the Finnish government and citizens.

The competition event will be remembered for its part Paavo Nurmen about flying steps with the Olympic torch, about Coca-Cola and a tentacle, but also about spreading the image of Finland to the world.

Home games it will be 70 years since the opening on Tuesday.

“In an international sense, the Helsinki Olympic Games were actually the first major Olympic competition covering the whole world”, summarizes the special expert of the Sports and Exercise Cultural Center Tahdo, or the former Sports Museum Vesa Tikander.

The giant neighbor, the Soviet Union, participated in the Olympic Games for the first time in Helsinki. There was also China, as well as the Federal Republic of Germany and Japan, who were absent from the London 1948 Summer Games as the losers of the World War.

With the competition project, Finland showed the world that it did not belong to the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, but to the group of western democracies.

“Of course, it was also important for Finland that the first appearance of the Soviet Union in the Olympic arenas took place on Finnish soil. Finland was able to prove that it is a neutral and worthy country to host a large international sports festival,” says Tikander.

Helsinki the Olympic event, which significantly changed the street scene, had a large number of athletes. The athletic level of the games was also high.

A little over 4,900 athletes from 69 different countries participated in the Olympics, of which a good ten percent were women. In swimming, gymnastics and athletics, women could compete in several forms of competition, but in many other sports the opportunities to participate were limited or impossible.

“Women’s sports were on a growing trend, but we hadn’t gotten very far yet. For example, fencing and kayaking had one series in addition to the men’s series.”

“Finland Sylvi Saimo won the rowing competition. She was the first Finnish female Olympic winner of the Summer Games, if you don’t count art sports,” Tikander reminds.

Finland collected six golds, three silvers and 13 bronzes from the home games, which was enough to finish eighth in the medal table. However, the success in the competition left a sour taste for the Finns, as the most significant sport, athletics, brought only one medal, the javelin thrower Toivo Hyytiäinen achieved bronze.

Finland, on the other hand, did not have many hopes for a medal in athletics at the home games. In the early 1950s, the traditional successful sport of endurance running was in a backwater phase.

“After athletics, all other sports were considered slightly inferior in Finland at that time. For example, canoeing, which had the largest medal haul (4 gold, 1 silver, 1 bronze), was a very young and unknown sport in Finland. Not many people followed that sport 70 years ago and not even after, because the games were the pinnacle of Finnish paddling history,” Tikander knows.

of the Games the brightest star athlete was the “Czech Locomotive” Emil Zatopek, who grabbed the gold medals for Czechoslovakia in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters and historically also in the marathon. Stars were also seen on the football pitches when Ferenc Puskas led by Hungary’s illustrious team advanced to an irresistible Olympic victory.

Gymnastics in the Soviet Union Viktor Tshukarin cheered four of the seven Olympic golds in his career in the Töölö race hall known as Messuhalli.

Boxing gold in the same building from the United States Of Floyd Patterson became a star later with his two world heavyweight championships.

Helsinki the games were managed to be organized without sporting scandals or big uproar, even though the world political situation was delicate and the cold war had started. The Finnish government was worried about possible provocations, but such was only seen after the Games, when a Romanian pistol shooter Panait Calcai defected from Helsinki to the west.

The Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc athletes were accommodated in Otaniemi during the Games. Male athletes from other countries were accommodated in Käpylä and female athletes in Meilahti.

“East and West teams and athletes made return visits to each other’s Olympic villages. Then there was a supervisor there to see that nothing extra could happen,” says Tikander.

The citizens of Finland welcomed the visitors from foreign cultures with open arms.

“It was very important to the Finns that the games be organized in the best possible way. When all countries had a good impression of the Finns as competition organizers, it also made up for the weak sporting success in a way,” says Tikander, referring to athletics in particular.

Olympic competitions have swelled in 70 years into massive events with many mild phenomena. After the Helsinki Games, the use of doping quickly became common around the world, and the upcoming Olympic competitions were also overshadowed by several boycotts.

In Finland, the Helsinki Games have sometimes been referred to as “the last real Olympics”. The term has been used to emphasize the appropriate size of the competition event and good sportsmanship.

“It’s a term invented by the Finns themselves. The best way to describe the Games is that they were the first global Olympic Games”, emphasizes Tikander.