– “It really warmed us veterans’ hearts when a Jukola course setter from a few years ago said, ‘Jukola would not be the great nationwide orienteering festival it is today without you.’”
There is a hint of pride in Äänekoski local Petri Hämynen’s voice, and with good reason. Hämynen, 59, is one of the cornerstones of the Äänekoski Comics Society’s (ÄSS) Jukola team, and ÄSS in turn has, in its own inimitable way, left its mark on the history of this midsummer orienteering festival.
ÄSS was founded in 1981 “to promote the status of Central Finnish comics”. National attention, however, started to arise elsewhere, when the comics enthusiasts with a taste for different sports decided in 1992 to give orienteering a try as well. And to start directly from the top level, at Jukola.
The debut race did not produce a result, because the finish line was closed before two of the relay runners from Äänekoski made it in.
– “First-time Jukola participants often say they last orienteered in the army, but since we had conscientious objectors, we had not even done that. I was the only one in the group who had ever seen a real orienteering map, in the brigade championships during my conscription. And that race also ended in a ‘did not finish’,” Hämynen recalls.
The beginning was bleak, but the spark had been lit, and since then ÄSS has taken part in every Jukola. Their best placing is 566th, but because the focus has always been more on relaxed performance than on the final result, all sorts of things have happened along the way. So much that it is no exaggeration to talk about Jukola legends.
They wanted to get rid of the wild teams
At first the legendary status was very much in the spirit of ski jumper Eddie Edwards: after their debut, ÄSS finished last in the Jukola Relay three years in a row from 1993 to 1995. At the 1988 Calgary Olympics the British Edwards was so poor that the international ski authorities felt offended and created a rule to keep “Eddie the Eagle” style strugglers away from the Olympic hills.
ÄSS was close to sharing Edwards’s fate after its first last place, when the Jukola organising committee decided in the spring of 1994 to tighten control of who was allowed to take part. At that time, only “real” sports clubs (and pure brother and sister teams) were eligible to participate, but because the rules were not strictly enforced, various workplace and friendship teams had slipped into the event.
Among the “wild” teams were, among others, ÄSS, the bottom team from 1991 and 1992 Ylistaro Alapää Youth Association, and some twenty others.
– “Some of them got spooked, joined some federation in one way or another and were allowed to continue participating,” Hämynen recalls.
– “In our case the whole fuss was unnecessary. We had already joined the Greater Helsinki district of TUL, so we had full rights to take part.”
“Our greatest achievement at Jukola”
ÄSS had joined TUL because of track and field, since there was plenty of appetite for trying different disciplines.
– “We organised decathlon club championships, and you could not rent the Eläintarha athletics field unless you were a proper sports club,” Hämynen explains.
The members of ÄSS have battled for club titles in the king of athletics, the decathlon, since 1987, almost without exception at the legendary Eläintarha field in Helsinki. The competition takes place in true ÄSS style: boldly in a single day and under men’s rules, so for example the hurdle heights and the weight of the implements are the same as in the senior men’s category.
The 1994 Jukola participation dispute was eventually resolved when the relay’s organising committee and the Finnish Orienteering Federation decided to loosen the entry rules on a trial basis: in the 1995 relays, in addition to the usual club teams, freely formed community teams were also allowed, provided that the team name was “in accordance with good manners and the dignity of Jukola”.
The experiment soon became standard practice.
– “Common sense won out and Jukola truly became an event for the whole nation. We were pioneers and played a big part in ensuring that recreational teams were officially allowed in as well.
– We are proud of that. It is probably our greatest achievement at Jukola,” Petri Hämynen says with satisfaction.
“The black dots are rocks and you can ignore the rest”
In the early years, the ÄSS team came to Jukola accompanied by “coaches” and entertainers with guitars. At Vehka-Jukola in 1992 the atmosphere was so exuberant that, according to Suunnistaja magazine, the occupants of the neighbouring tent dismantled it and moved elsewhere.
After that came the run of three consecutive last places, but there was no shortage of incidents and their reputation grew:
At Sipoo in 1995 ÄSS briefly appeared at the top of the results list as an overwhelming winner with a time of 3:39:43. The bizarre situation arose because the results software could not handle a total time of more than 24 hours (27 hours, 39 minutes and 43 seconds). By the time the confusion was cleared up, the real winning team, the Norwegian NTHI, had long since been on their way home.
ÄSS’s Jyrki Nummela became a Jukola record man in Sipoo. He set off as a complete novice on leg three, was at one point declared missing, and finally reached the changeover zone in 8:21:59. No one had ever spent that long on a single Jukola leg.
– “I did not know the map symbols. I was told that the black dots are rocks and that I did not need to worry about the rest,” Nummela described his adventure to Kymen Sanomat at Salpa-Jukola in 2011.
– “In the end Jyrki’s performance was probably actually good PR for Jukola,” says Petri Hämynen.
World Cup football and the Jukola classic
At Luosto in 1994, Teijo Piilonen, who had finished leg two for ÄSS, waited in the changeover pen for over an hour, because the runner for leg three was in the tent watching World Cup football on TV.
– “The calculation had been that the next leg runner would have time to watch in peace the Romania–Colombia match that ended at 4:15 am, but the first two legs had gone unexpectedly fast. Someone said then that the orienteering was already starting to work, but we needed to practise the changeovers,” Petri Hämynen laughs.
There are keen footballers in the ÄSS ranks, and in World Cup years it has sometimes been difficult to assemble Jukola teams.
At times there have been line-up problems even without football: at Sulkava in 2003 ÄSS completed the seven-leg relay with only three men. Petri Hämynen ran legs 2, 4 and 6, Timo Hämynen legs 3 and 5, and Teijo Piilonen legs 1 and 7.
Within the Comics Society, Piilonen’s pioneering feat of running both the opening and anchor legs in the same race is known as “the Jukola classic”. Four other ÄSS runners have since completed the classic, and Piilonen himself has now done it four times.
There have been plenty of “Kauttos”
Running multiple legs in Jukola is forbidden, but many recreational teams take a flexible view of the rule.
– “There are quite a few artists in other teams too. We have never doubled up on legs deliberately, but since we have always wanted to get a result, sometimes we have had to ‘go with the Kauttos’,” Hämynen says.
Kautto is a very common surname in Äänekoski, and it has often been used on the team list to conceal the names of those who have run more than one leg. Not a single real Kautto has ever run for an ÄSS team.
– “At one point we tried to persuade sports journalist Matti Kautto from the newspaper Sisä-Suomen lehti to join us, saying ‘come and be a real Kautto’. But we did not succeed.”
A collision with a tank
In the summer of 2006, Helsingin Sanomat carried a small news item with the headline “Passenger car collides with tank”.
– “That famous last control was a matter of a split second,” says Petri Hämynen.
– “We were on our way to the Salo Jukola, overtaking a special army transport on the motorway behind a van, when a car came towards us in the wrong direction. We were doing more than a hundred, but fortunately Timo’s reflexes kicked in and after a quick evasive manoeuvre we only hit the tracks of the tank on the trailer. The conditions were there for something much worse than just damage to the bodywork.
– The parking marshals in Salo certainly stared for a while at the battered side of the car when we crawled out through whatever opening we could find.”
No sign of quitting
Petri Hämynen has now run in 33 Jukola relays. With all the double legs combined he has already accumulated 46 legs.
In total, 81 different men and 26 women have run in Comics Society teams over the years. Well-known Finnish athletes in ÄSS colours have included javelin world champion Kimmo Kinnunen and multi-time national sprint champion Ari Pakarinen.
In recent years ÄSS has not often had to rely on the inexhaustible running power of the “Kauttos”, but there still has not been a queue to get into the teams.
– “As we have got older, the group of ‘reserve runners staying at home’ has grown, but we have, one could say, friendship clubs from which we can call in friends when needed. It will probably be many years yet before we stay away from Jukola,” promises Petri Hämynen.
– “At the same time there is a generational shift under way, as we have brought in the brothers’ sons and their and relatives’ friends. Almost everyone has some kind of connection to Äänekoski, like ‘I worked on building the factory in Koski’ or ‘my wife’s cousin is one of the founders of ÄSS’. At last summer’s Jukola in Mikkeli, about 85 per cent of the runners in our two teams had some background link to Äänekoski.”
With two men’s teams, ÄSS is planning to come to Kotka-Jukola as well.
“We have always tried to do our best”
There have been no last places for the Comics Society since the 1990s triple, and according to Hämynen, ÄSS has never aimed for them on purpose anyway. In Mikkeli the club finished 1167th and 1254th, while 1318 teams finished the relay with valid results.
– “From the early days on we have always tried to do our best,” Hämynen insists.
– “In recent years the wooden spoons have avoided us, because in 30 years you do learn to orienteer, even if you only go once a summer. As we have aged, the pace has slowed, but we probably still need to wait a few more years before we drop back to the placings we had at the beginning.”
