2014

Halmesvirta, Anssi

This article analyses how the role of sportsmen as defenders of the country was seen during the Winter War (1939–1940) and how their performance as soldiers was evaluated by sports experts. The image of the Finnish sportsman (cf. Paavo Nurmi) as physically and mentally particularly fit type of soldier was disseminated by the Finnish sports journal Suomen Urheilulehti and the characteristics of the Finnish sportsmen as soldiers were compared with the ‘average’ soldiers and the attacking Russians, ‘Ruskies’, the Red Army soldiers. ‘Ruskie’, in Finnish ryssä, is a term of abuse to designate Alterity that could never be domesticated, hateful and fearful Otherness beyond history for the Finn. On the pages of the Finnish sports journal these ‘Ruskies’ were not regarded so much as an army of trained soldiers but as a demoralized and an unorganized horde of Asiatic barbarians or uncontrolled flock of lambs who attacked senselessly, without understanding of strategy and modern rules of warfare. The Finnish sportsmen were presented as the reverse of this picture, defending not only their own country but also the Western civilization and its basic values (freedom, Christianity, chastity, democracy, civic virtues etc.). It was as if the Finnish sportsman-soldier was the paragon having individually internalized military virtues, whereas the ‘Ruskies’ could only make a show resembling a Potemkin-type of fasade. And even if Finland lost the war and the Olympics of 1940, for which the Finnish sports-life had prepared itself, had to be postponed, the sportsmen were considered the ones who had saved the country best and whose physique and mental stamina could bear warfare better than the ones of the average soldier.