49 Fun Facts About Paavo Nurmi

By what nickname was Paavo Nurmi known for dominating distance running in the 1920s?

The Flying Finn was so quiet and elusive that the press gave him a second name, the Phantom Finn.

Which US president invited Nurmi to the White House during his 1925 tour of America?

Calvin Coolidge received him during a five-month tour of 55 races that filled American sports pages, though the gruelling schedule took its toll on him.

Who finally broke Nurmi's record of nine Olympic gold medals?

Michael Phelps won his tenth gold in Beijing in 2008, finishing the 200 m butterfly unable to see after his goggles filled with water; Latynina, Spitz and Lewis had only drawn level with Nurmi.

World records from Nurmi's 1925 American tour never became official because he ran them where?

Indoors was where 45 of his 55 American races were held, and the sport's world body ratified no indoor records until the 1980s, so none of those marks ever joined his official list.

In 1968 Nurmi set up a foundation that still funds research into which illness?

Heart disease had struck Nurmi himself: after surviving a heart attack he founded the Paavo Nurmi Foundation, which still pays for cardiovascular research in Finland and holds symposia in his name.

Nurmi left school to run errands for what kind of business?

A bakery's wages were needed at home after his father, a carpenter, died in 1910 and left the family struggling; Nurmi all but gave up running for a time, until the 1912 Olympics fired him up again.

Which Finnish runner's feats at the 1912 Olympics inspired the 15-year-old Nurmi to take up athletics seriously?

Hannes Kolehmainen won three distance golds at those Games and was said to have 'run Finland onto the map of the world'; Nurmi got his first running shoes soon afterwards and began training in earnest.

By a much-told story, what did Nurmi do as an army conscript to lengthen his stride?

Running behind trains while gripping the rear bumper is how Finnish accounts say he stretched his stride, though his son Matti later dismissed tales of his father racing trains as nonsense made up about him.

Nurmi made his Olympic debut in 1920 in which city?

Antwerp hosted as a tribute to a country ravaged by the First World War, with the defeated Central Powers barred; Nurmi lost his first final there, then won three gold medals in the next six days.

Which Frenchman beat Nurmi in the 1920 Olympic 5000 m, the only Olympic final he lost to a non-Finn?

Joseph Guillemot had a lung permanently damaged by mustard gas in the First World War; three days later Nurmi beat him over 10,000 m, and the Frenchman, who had just eaten a large lunch, was sick on the Finn's shoes.

What object did Nurmi famously carry in his hand during races?

A stopwatch let him race the clock instead of his rivals: he spread his effort evenly over every lap rather than sprinting the early ones, and even-pace running has been credited to him ever since.

Only Nurmi has held which three world records at the same time?

Mile, 5,000 m and 10,000 m records were all his by the end of 1923, yet Finnish officials kept him out of the 10,000 m at the 1924 Olympics, so he went home and lowered that record again.

After excelling in mathematics, Nurmi graduated in 1923 with what qualification?

Engineer is the usual English word for it: he qualified as a mechanical technician after three years at Helsinki's industrial school, on a scholarship his 1920 Olympic medals had won him.

Three weeks before the 1924 Olympics, Nurmi rehearsed his 1,500 m and 5,000 m double in Helsinki with what result?

Two world records fell inside an hour at Helsinki's Eläintarha track on 19 June 1924; in the Paris heat he then won both Olympic finals on one afternoon, easing up in the first to save himself.

Nurmi is said to have agreed to a 70th-birthday broadcast interview only because who was asking the questions?

The president of Finland, Urho Kekkonen, a former national high jump champion, put the questions himself; Nurmi had shunned interviews for most of his life.

Which Olympic event, twice won by Nurmi, was dropped after most of the 1924 field failed to finish?

Cross country was run over a shadeless course on one of the hottest days Paris had known: only 15 of the 38 starters finished, several were carried off on stretchers, and Nurmi won by nearly a minute and a half.

What did Nurmi's 1920 Olympic golds bring to his family's home?

Electric light and running water arrived with his new earnings, and the family, which had let its kitchen to lodgers and lived in a single room, got the whole apartment back.

Though banned from the 1932 Olympics, Nurmi still travelled to which host city and trained in the Olympic Village?

Los Angeles saw him train on in the Olympic Village despite the ban and an injured foot, until his entries were thrown out days before his races and he was left to watch from the stands.

To which country had Nurmi's great Finnish rival Ville Ritola emigrated in 1913?

The USA was home to Ritola for his whole career: he won a string of American titles, came back to Finland only for the Olympic years and never once ran in the Finnish championships.

In which foreign capital did Nurmi set both his first world record, in 1921, and his mile record in 1923?

Stockholm's mile is said to show his method: three quarter-miles of 63 seconds each, then a faster last lap, for a record that stood eight years.

Nurmi's 1925 tour of the United States began at a sold-out event in which venue?

Madison Square Garden staged a replay of his Olympic double on 6 January 1925: he won a mile and a 5,000 m inside an hour, both in world-best time, beating America's top milers in the first and an old Olympic rival in the second.

Nurmi's 1925 American tour ended with a rare defeat, over half a mile, at which famous ballpark?

Yankee Stadium was where he finally met a specialist at the specialist's own distance: Alan Helffrich, America's half-mile champion and an Olympic relay gold medallist, ended a winning run that went back to 1921.

In 1926 Nurmi lost his 1,500 m world record in a specially arranged race won by a runner from which country?

Germany's Otto Peltzer won it in Berlin, with Edvin Wide also in the field; his country had been shut out of the 1920 and 1924 Olympics, so he had never been able to face Nurmi at the Games.

At the 1928 Olympics, Nurmi fell heavily in a heat of which event, one he had barely tried before?

The 3000 m steeplechase heat saw him land on his back in the water jump; the Frenchman Lucien Duquesne stopped to pull him out, and Nurmi repaid him by pacing him through the rest of the race and into the final.

In 2000 Helsinki's Olympic Stadium staged 'Paavo the Great', a work about Nurmi in which art form?

Opera it was: the poet Paavo Haavikko wrote the libretto and Tuomas Kantelinen the music, so the most tight-lipped of champions became a singing hero at the stadium where his statue stands.

In 1931 Nurmi became the first runner to break which barrier?

Two miles in under nine minutes, 8:59.6 in Helsinki, showed at 34 that a man by then training for the marathon still had his speed; it proved to be the last of his official world records.

Which body suspended Nurmi in April 1932 pending an investigation into his amateur status?

The IAAF suspended him from international competition; the Finnish federation sided with Nurmi, so he went on racing at home until 1934 but never again abroad.

What has Nurmi's childhood home in Turku been since the centenary of his birth in 1997?

A museum now fills the one-room flat, which had been sold off and had fallen into ruin before it was restored for his centenary and furnished as the family knew it in the 1920s.

Officials from which country led the drive to have Nurmi banned before the 1932 Olympics?

Sweden's Sigfrid Edström drove the case against him; Finland broke off athletic relations with its neighbour over the affair, and the two countries' match was not held again until 1939.

On the eve of the 1932 Olympic marathon, who petitioned for the banned Nurmi to be allowed to start?

His rivals in the race asked officials to let him run against them and were turned down; Nurmi, nursing an injured foot, claimed afterwards that he would have won by five minutes.

Which former US president ran the relief fund for which Nurmi and his protégé Taisto Mäki toured America?

Herbert Hoover, who had made his name feeding occupied Belgium in the First World War, set up the Finnish Relief Fund, and the takings from Mäki's exhibition races went into it.

Nurmi ran his last race in 1934 in Viipuri, then a Finnish city, now part of which country?

Russia's Vyborg today, Viipuri was ceded to the Soviet Union in the 1940s; Nurmi ran his last race there because the Finnish federation never accepted his ban and let him race on at home as a 'national amateur'.

What kind of shop did Nurmi open under his own name in Helsinki in 1936?

A men's clothing store was one step in turning the banned runner into a businessman: he died one of the richest men in Finland, with a fortune made in business rather than on the track.

After his running days, which business made Nurmi a millionaire in Helsinki?

Construction was his second career: his company put up some forty apartment blocks in Helsinki, and he later found a flat in one of them for his old rival Ville Ritola.

During which conflict did Nurmi tour the United States with protégé Taisto Mäki to raise funds for Finland?

Former president Herbert Hoover directed the relief drive and called the pair 'ambassadors of the greatest sporting nation in the world.'

What role did Nurmi play at the opening of the 1952 Helsinki Olympics?

Carried the torch in and lit the flame: the last runner's name was kept secret until the scoreboard flashed it, and 70,000 spectators fell silent, then roared.

Which future Olympic champion chanted 'I am Nurmi!' over and over while training as a boy?

Emil Zátopek built his own training on whatever he could read about the secretive Finn's methods, and in 1952 he won three distance golds at the Helsinki Olympics.

When the teenage Nurmi began training seriously, what kind of diet did he keep to for several years?

A vegetarian diet, the same kind the Olympic hero who inspired him kept to, was part of the strict regime he set himself at 15; he dropped it at 21 and ate everything afterwards.

How does Wäinö Aaltonen's famous bronze statue outside Helsinki's Olympic Stadium show Nurmi?

Running nude, in the manner of ancient Greek athletes, the original spent decades inside the Ateneum gallery in Helsinki; on first seeing it Nurmi is said to have snorted, 'I don't run naked.'

In a 1961 student prank, a small copy of Nurmi's statue was 'found' aboard which famous shipwreck?

The Vasa, a Swedish warship that sank on her maiden voyage in 1628, was about to be lifted from the seabed when students from Helsinki's technical university smuggled the statuette aboard shortly before the final lift.

Nurmi's portrait appeared in the 1980s on the ten-unit banknote of which former Finnish currency?

The markka's ten-mark note paired his portrait with the Helsinki Olympic Stadium, but from 1993 it gave way to a ten-mark coin and a new 20-mark note honouring the novelist Väinö Linna.

In 1969 Finnair gave the name 'Paavo Nurmi' to what?

Its first long-haul jet, a four-engined DC-8, carried the runner's name on the airline's inaugural flight to New York; the second of the type was named Jean Sibelius.

The Paavo Nurmi Marathon, held since 1969, is the oldest marathon in which US state?

Wisconsin's far-northern town of Hurley stages the race each August to celebrate the area's Finnish heritage, which is how a marathon in the American Midwest came to carry a Finnish runner's name.

Which Australian set a mile world record in 1954 in Nurmi's home town?

John Landy ran 3:58.0 at the Turku stadium that now bears Nurmi's name, becoming the second man under four minutes and taking the record from Roger Bannister only weeks after the Englishman had set it.

Which Hollywood horror icon was often described, without documentary proof, as Nurmi's niece?

Official records do not support the kinship, though the shared surname kept the story alive.

Which piece of music did Nurmi ask to have played at his state funeral in 1973?

He enjoyed classical music and played the violin; President Kekkonen said his class was 'extinguished with him.'

Which Moroccan became the first man since Nurmi to win the 1,500 m and 5,000 m at the same Olympics?

Hicham El Guerrouj did it in Athens in 2004, eighty years after Nurmi, having fallen in the 1,500 m final of 1996 and been beaten into silver in 2000.

In 1932 Nurmi finally left his family's Turku flat to do what?

Get married is what finally took him, in his mid-thirties and world famous, out of the flat he had grown up in; the marriage to Sylvi Laaksonen produced a son, Matti, and ended in divorce within three years.

At whose request was the 1920 Olympic 10,000 m final brought forward, catching Nurmi's French rival just after a large lunch?

The King of Belgium, Albert I, asked for the earlier start; the Frenchman heard only after eating, ran in shoes two sizes too big because his own had been stolen, and still finished second to Nurmi.