Sports, ‘race’ and the Finnish national identity in Helsingin Sanomat in the early twentieth century

Abstract

The main goals of this article are first to examine through Olympic sports journalism what hierarchies and categorisations of the global space and the people populating it were considered important to the national imagery in Finland at the beginning of the twentieth century and, secondly, to assess how the notion of race was intertwined with these categorisations. Sports journalism played an important role in Finland by constructing and legitimising a national imagery and by providing accounts of other races, cultures and nationalities that were considered ‘different’ from ‘us’. The article concludes that sports journalism at that time employed three major discursive practices that were aimed at constructing an image of a white, Western and Finnish nation living in the north. The ‘others’ were placed in a hierarchy, in which their position was determined by their racial background and assumed similarities/differences in appearance and behaviour as compared with Finnish males.