Swedish Visions of a ‘Smiling Finn’: Interpreting Hannes Kolehmainen in Sweden

Abstract

Swedish media texts written in the first half of the twentieth-century about the Finnish champion runner Hannes Kolehmainen, the triple gold medallist of the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, can be read as wide-ranging discourses on nationalism and masculinity. Arguably, few people in contemporary Sweden recall Kolehmainen, but during the Olympic games of 1912 and 1920 he was depicted in extensive reports by leading sport journalists as a true sports hero. Ultimately, his heroic aura reached a climax when he was praised in stories narrating the opening ceremony of the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. The final example of the Kolehmainen cult in Sweden can be found in the eulogy published upon his death in 1966. For understandable reasons, the Swedish texts tend to focus on Kolehmainen's outstanding athletic qualities, but they also convey specifically Swedish notions about Finnish-ness and Nordic masculinity as well as containing implicit ideas about what constituted ‘proper’ Swedish manliness during the period under discussion.