Racing past history in Paavo Nurmi Games
Rinne's 3:35.20 clocking lowered decades-old Finnish record in men's 1,500 meters
Four weeks ago today, Marcell Jacobs of Italy turned in the headline performance of the Paavo Nurmi Games in Turku, Finland, when he won the men’s 100 meters in 9.92 seconds, his fastest time since he set a European record of 9.80 in winning the Olympic title in Tokyo in 2021.
Yet it’s possible that some spectators at the meet felt that a more significant effort had occurred 45 minutes earlier when Finland’s Joonas Rinne ran 3 minutes 35.20 seconds in the men’s 1,500 meters to place eighth in a race won by Cathal Doyle of Ireland.
Doyle’s time of 3:34.09 tightened his hold on fifth on the all-time Irish performer list, but Rinne’s personal best broke a decades-old Finnish record that had been set in either 1980 or 1972, depending on how one views the difference between fully-automatic and hand-held times.
“This has been one of my big goals for many years so it of course feels amazing to achieve it,” Rinne wrote in an email. “The fact that the record is such an old one makes it all the more special. Many great athletes have tried to break that record but now I did it – it feels surreal.”
He added that he knew the national record was “was officially shared” by Pekka Vasala and Antti Loikkanen, “but honestly I viewed Vasala more as the record holder.”
While World Athletics lists Loikkanen’s hand-held time of 3:36.3 from 1980 as being faster than Vasala’s fully-automatic mark of 3:36.33 from 1972, the Finnish Athletics Federation carried both marks as the national record.
Vasala’s performance had extra historical significance as it came in the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich in which he upset defending champion Kip Keino of Kenya for the gold medal after running his final 200 meters in 26.3 seconds, his last 400 in 53.4, and his concluding 800 in a scintillating 1:49.0.
Vasala’s gold medal was one of three that Finnish runners won in the 1972 Games as Lasse Viren set a world record of 27:38.4 in the 10,000 meters before winning the 5,000 in an Olympic record of 13:26.4.
Although Viren would repeat his 5,000-10,000 double in the Games of Montreal in 1976 to become the first of only two men to win both events in consecutive Olympics, and compatriot Kaarlo Maaninka would place second in the 10,000 and third in the 5,000 in the 1980 Games in Moscow, no Finnish distance runner has won a medal in the Olympic Games since then.
That drought might not seem surprising when one considers that Finland is a relatively small nation with a population of roughly 5.6 million, but the country was the world’s distance-running powerhouse in the 1920s and 1930s.
Led by the legendary Flying Finn, Paavo Nurmi, as well as by other standouts such as Hannes Kolehmainen and Ville Ritola, Finnish runners won 45 medals, including 24 gold medals, in the six Olympiads that were held from 1912-36.
Finnish runners won the men’s 1,500, 3,000 steeplechase, 5,000, 10,000, and marathon in the 1924 Games in Paris and they were victorious in the 1,500 through 10,000 in Amsterdam in 1928, and also won a bronze medal in the marathon.
Finns also swept the medals in the 10,000 and finished first and second in the 5,000 and steeplechase, respectively, in the 1936 Games in Berlin. But they won only one distance medal in the ensuing six Olympiads from 1948-68.
Then came the Games of 1972, '76 and '80 when Finnish athletes combined to win eight medals, including five gold medals, in races ranging from the 1,500 to the 10,000.
However, that stretch of success had been followed by a long period of stagnation when it came to the lowering of national records in several distance events, including the 1,500.
Rinne, 29, was aware of that slump as he became one of the nation’s top performers in both the 1,500 and 800.
He won the first of seven Finnish titles in the 1,500 in 2017 and garnered the first of four championships in the 800 in 2020.
After compatriot Topi Raitanen and Rinne lowered their personal bests in the 1,500 to 3:38.48 and 3:38.56, respectively, in 2021, they entered the 2022 season intent on lowering the national record. However, it wasn’t to be that year as Rinne’s best was 3:39.86 and Raitanen’s was 3:43.84, although Raitanen did win the steeplechase in the European Athletics Championships.
Last year saw Rinne and Raitanen lower their 1,500 bests to 3:37.65 and 3:38.47, respectively, but they ended up second and third on the yearly national performer list behind 21-year-old Santtu Heikkinen, who clocked 3:37.62.
However, this season has been the best of Rinne’s career.
After breaking 3:38 four times last year, he ran 3:37.87 and a personal best of 3:37.22 in a pair of meets in Norway in late May before he clocked 3:39.21 to finish fifth in the Josef Odlozil Memorial in Prague on June 3.
Then came the Nurmi Games at Paavo Nurmi Stadium fifteen days later when he figured he had a legitimate chance to break the national record as he toed the starting line.
“I actually had quite a bit of pressure for breaking that record in that race because I knew how good an opportunity it was for it,” he wrote. “That was the kind of fast start list I’ve been hoping for the past few years.”
While all the ingredients seemed to be in place for a national record-breaking performance, Rinne wrote that the race “went well, but not perfectly as I planned. With 500m to go, I noticed that there was quite a big gap between me and the main group that had formed when I wasn’t expecting it.
“I was able to catch up to the main group and do a strong last lap but I think I would have had a stronger last 100m if I had not fallen so far behind midway.”
Rinne was in 11th place with 260 meters left in the race, but he had moved into ninth with half a lap left and he picked up another spot by the end of the contest.
Although he did not know his time immediately after crossing the finish line, he figured he had lowered the record when he saw Doyle had run 3:34.09.
“Once I saw the winning time was 3:34 low I was pretty sure that I had broken the record and was only nervous on did I make it into the top 8 because I wasn’t sure of that and that was very important for the Olympic rankings points,” he wrote.
Because Rinne’s best time in the 1,500 did not meet the automatic qualifying standard of 3:33.50 for the Olympic Games, his other avenue for advancing to the meet was via a rankings system kept by World Athletics.
While he ultimately came up short in that regard and will not be competing in the Olympics in Paris, he will always cherish how he felt when it was announced that he had broken the national record in the 1,500 at the same venue where Australian John Landy set a world record of 3:58.0 in the mile in 1954 and Finns Olavi Salsola and Olavi Salonen lowered the world record to 3:40.2 in the 1,500 in 1957 in a race in which each of them was credited with the same time.
“It was an amazing moment,” Rinne wrote. “What a place to break that record with 13,000 Finnish people in the crowd around me. I just took it all in and thanked the crowd.”