The Olympics

The Olympic Games in London are over, and so is our two-week stretch of staying up late every night to watch the competitions. Finland ended the Games with three medals, about as expected. The US, needless to say, did much better (104 medals), with some spectacular wins.

Paavo Nurmi lighting the Olympic fame
in Helsinki, 1952.

It’s a shame Finland didn’t do better. Track and field athletics have historically been a big deal here. Finland still has the all-time record in the number of medals awarded. On a per capita basis, that is. Since the beginning of the modern Games, Finland has won a total of 300 medals (make that 303 now) one for every 18,000 or so inhabitants, beating out second-place Sweden (sweet) to, well, take the gold in medal winning itself.

No one was more responsible for this tradition than the legendary runner Paavo Nurmi, the “Flying Finn” who won a total of nine gold and three silver medals in the 1920s. More recently, Lasse Virén won four golds in the 1970s, most famously in Munich, where he fell badly on the 12^th lap of the 10,000 meters race and was still able to overtake the pack to win with a world-record-breaking time.  

This past glory belies the fact that Finland’s track and field prowess has been in decline for some time. The medals this time came mostly from aquatic sports, and I don’t mean swimming. Tuuli Petäjä won the first, a silver in women’s windsurfing, which is especially fitting since her name “Tuuli” means “wind”. How could she not get a medal?

(On a political note, windsurfing is considered an elitist sport in the US, or at least it seemed so when Democratic presidential candidate, avid windsurfer, and really rich guy John Kerry was lambasted by his opponents for engaging in a sport so far removed from the concerns of the common man. At the time, windsurfing was to John Kerry, as dressage is to Mitt Romney today.)

Finland’s other medals (both bronze) came from women’s sailing and men’s javelin. Finland has often been strong in javelin, with stars from the 1980s still household names today. This time there were three Finnish javelin throwers among the 12 finalist. Not bad. In sailing, Finland’s hopes of going for the gold were dashed when too little wind cut short the second-round race against Australia, leaving the three-woman crew to use their Finnish seamanship to take the bronze from the Russians.

The Töölö Rowing Stadium.

At the very beginning of the Games, a few hours before the opening ceremony in London, I went kayaking in particularly glorious Finnish summer weather.

Heading southwest from my kayak club’s boathouse, I thought how apt it was to be paddling past a white structure perched on the shoreline a couple hundred meters to the east. The high, open pavilion sheltering a small grandstand off my port side was the Töölö Rowing Stadium.

These exact waters in Taivallahti bay were the venue for the Olympic canoeing competition in 1952, when Helsinki hosted the Summer Games, an Olympics seeped in more history than most.

Helsinki’s route to hosting the Games was a torturous one. The Finnish capital had come in second place in the completion to hold the 1940 Summer Games, losing out only to Tokyo, Japan. (Talk about some sinister zeitgeist there – the Games, hosted by Nazi Germany in 1936, were to be held next in bellicose imperial Japan.) However, the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, besides being a harbinger of the wider world war to come, ignited a global boycott against holding the Games in Tokyo. The International Olympic Committee then awarded the 1940 Olympics to runner-up Helsinki.

Of course, the geopolitical situation only got worse. Germany invaded Poland, the USSR invaded Finland, world war broke out, and javelin and discus throwing were the furthest things from anyone’s mind. The Games were suspended infinitely. Helsinki would have to wait until 1952 to be selected as host again.

By that time, the athletes who gathered in Helsinki reflected the new world order of the Cold War. Helsinki marked the Olympic debut of not only the Soviet Union, but also Israel and (briefly) the People’s Republic of China. (After that fleeting appearance, Communist China would not participate again until 1984.)

The Helsinki Games, as all Olympics do, also left numerous landmarks around the city. Some are the all-too-common Olympic “white elephants”, like the rowing stadium in Taivallahti, which I’ve seen being used only once, for some kind of outdoor choir practice. 

The 72-meter art deco tower at
Helsinki's Olympic Stadium.

That said, quite a few venues from the 1952 Games are still in use today, most notably the 41,000-seat Olympic Stadium and the nearby open-air swimming center. The stadium is often employed as a concert venue, most recently last Sunday for Madonna. Based on all the disappointing comments I’ve heard about the show, it was not the proudest moment in the stadium’s history.

Recently, I traveled the 100 miles to Tampere to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers perform in that city’s Ratina soccer stadium. To the side of the massive stage where Flea gyrated in a manner worthy of any gymnast, I couldn’t help notice that a lofty cauldron stood above a wall emblazoned with a small set of Olympic rings, reminders of the football preliminaries held here in 1952. In one of these, Italy had beaten the US, 

8-0. Ouch.

Soccer is still far from America’s strong suit when it comes to the Olympics (the US team didn’t even make it to Games this time around). Luckily, we have athletes like Michael “the Flying Fish” Phelps, the biggest medal winner of all time, to make up for such minor deficiencies. 

Stalin's Kudzu

Being from the southern US, I am all too familiar with a sight you often see traveling through Dixie – places where a single type of vegetation forms a thick, tangled carpet of green that covers not only acres and acres of land but also living trees, abandoned cars, derelict houses, you name it, anything that doesn’t move. I’m talking, of course, about kudzu.

Kudzu is a fast-growing vine native to southern Japan and parts of China and Korea. It was introduced to the US over a century ago and was adopted as a cure for soil erosion because it quickly takes root in land denuded of other vegetation. In that role, it succeeded. But it didn’t stop there. It just kept growing.

Kudzu overtaking trees near Atlanta.

It’s not an easy plant to kill, or harvest (supposedly, it does have some economic uses.) At least goats will eat it. I recall that in my hometown in Georgia, someone used these four-legged mowing machines to clear a kudzu-covered hillside. Usually, though, it seems kudzu resists all efforts to eradicate it. Every year, it envelops 150,000 additional acres (61,000 hectares) of US landscape, leading to the joke that it’s the “vine that ate the South”.

Exotic species, like kudzu, which thrive a little too well in new habitats pose huge problems, not only for humans, but also especially for native species they displace or feed on.

Currently, US biologists are dealing with the spread of Africanized bees (“killer bees”) in the southeast, an extremely aggressive fish, Asian carp, in the Mississippi watershed (potentially invading the Great Lakes), and even a proliferation of Burmese pythons (yikes!) in southern Florida marshlands, where they are decimating local wildlife.

Finland, too, has its share of exotic species. (However, with the Finnish winters, there’s no threat that Burmese pythons will ever get a foothold here.) Some of these invading species would hardly be even considered a nuisance, let alone noxious.

This summer, on a drive to Savo in eastern Finland we noticed that the exotic plant Lupinus polyphyllus was growing more abundantly along the roadside and spreading further north than ever before. This foreign species is otherwise known as “garden lupine”, a very attractive “wildflower” I seem to recall from road trips in Wyoming and Colorado. It doesn’t belong in Finland, though as invasive weeds go, it’s certainly not the most objectionable.  

Lupines in Alaska.

That’s not true for another weed I came to know this summer. Giant Hogweed (Heracleum genus) lives up to its disagreeable name. A native of the Caucasus Mountains, it grows up to four meters or more in height in Finland and spreads voraciously, easily crowding out native plants. It’s also bad news for humans. Contact with this toxic plant causes blisters on the skin that can result in permanent scars. A tiny amount of its sap in the eyes can cause blindness. It is one nasty, nasty member of the plant kingdom.

A colony of Giant Hogweed has established itself in an abandoned field downstream from my in-laws’ summer place in Savo. A local farmer has tried to destroy the particular outbreak of this weed from hell, but its growth seems hardly abated.

Giant Hogweed has been spreading to eastern Finland in recent years from Russia, where the offensive weed has thrived for decades. In fact, it was once actively cultivated there.

The story goes that Stalin, a native of Soviet Georgia, like Giant Hogweed itself, had seen in the monstrous weed great potential as a source of feed for collectivist cattle. It was to be the Soviet answer to a much better silage crop that wasn’t well suited to Mother Russia, but grows so abundantly in the imperialist fields of Iowa, namely maize (corn).

Giant Hogweed encroaching on an abandoned sauna in Savo.

Stalin reportedly decreed that Hogweed was to be introduced to northwest Russia in 1947, and it did produce a lot of plant material for livestock, just as Uncle Joe had hoped. But it also left a foul taste in the milk and meat of the cattle that ate it. That, and the small matter of its extreme toxicity to humans, doomed it as a crop of any use. Unfortunately, its failure as a crop didn’t doom it to oblivion. It only continued to spread, as it does today.

With some irony, Russians have come to call this almost indestructible plant “Stalin’s Revenge”. In light of my southern heritage, I can only think of it as “Stalin’s Kudzu”. 

Tiny Seeds of Summer

In the last week or so, another little sign of seasonal change has been in the air. Literally. It’s hard to miss the flecks of brown stuff floating on the breeze and filtering in through our open windows to settle on everything from desktops to bedspreads. Outside it sometimes looks like a barely visible snowstorm.

These tiny, winged bits of flotsam are birch-tree seeds, the result of this spring’s prolific output of pollen.

Since they don’t affect anyone’s nose, throat or lungs, birch seeds are not much of a topic of conversation. As you could imagine. I usually don’t give them much thought, except this year, which is seeing a “crop” much bigger (in a relative sense) than normal.

Lately, they are hard to miss, as tiny as they are. Besides finding these flea-sized seeds sprinkled around the house, I see them littering walking paths and accumulating along sidewalks, where even miniature “seed drifts” sometimes form.

The fact that there’s an exceptional amount of these tiny flakes of biomass all around us only hammers home a fact no one here could escape anyway – summer, as it always does, is coming to an end. 

Birch seeds.

Another acceptable loss?

Sixteen days. That’s how much time has elapsed between the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, which left 12 moviegoers dead, and the next sensational mass shooting, on Sunday, in which at least six worshipers at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin were murdered by someone whose motives at this point are unclear. Sixteen days.

If I ever doubted that the numerous and periodic loss of life due to gunfire is a loss America is willing to accept, those doubts vanished after the Aurora shooting.

On the Internet and in the media, there was a stunning rush by supporters of America’s gun culture who – while offering sympathy and prayers for the innocent victims in Aurora – pleaded that under no circumstances should the national tragedy be sullied by bringing up anything as uncouth as the idea of restricting, in any way, the sale of guns used in such killing sprees.

Well, it wasn’t so much that they “pleaded” to keep the topic of gun control out of public discourse; the tone was more “demanding”, as if daring anyone to even propose a public debate on the issue.

I started to wonder:  if a fresh rampage by a gun-toting madman every year or six months isn’t shocking or alarming enough to spark a real debate about gun control, then how often do Americans have to endure such carnage before they feel incensed enough to bring up the subject in polite company?

There must be a frequency and scale of gun deaths at which public opinion finally turns vigorously against the gun lobby. What would be that tipping point be? 

Would it take an Aurora-scale massacre happening every month or so to enrage the public enough to consider some restrictions on guns and embolden US politicians enough to stand up to the NRA? Or would it require rampages on a weekly basis? Twice weekly, even?

I certainly hope it would never take such appallingly high body counts to force Americans do more than simply shrug their shoulders at the news of another shooting. The way things are going though, I’m not overly optimism.

In Finland, following shootings at two schools and a shopping center, laws concerning handguns were tightened. Effective at the beginning of the year, anyone planning to buy a handgun must show that they are an active member of a shooting club and may also need to provide a certificate of mental health. Under these requirements, the murderer in Aurora could not have legally obtained his guns.

Okay, I know some will say you can’t compare countries like Finland and the US. Finland doesn’t have the levels of crime that the US has. Finns don’t have Americans’ huge appetite for narcotics, and consequently isn’t such fertile ground for large organized criminal gangs. Also, Finns don’t generally fear their own duly elected politicians and don’t feel the need to defend themselves against the eventual apocalyptic subjugation by government that apparently prompts some (maybe many) American gun owners to stockpile enough weapons and ammo to kill entire platoons.

When it comes to the issue of guns, you could say that Finns live in a normal, reasonable and peaceful world. Sometimes, I wonder where Americans live. 

Old Spice Tales

Aftershave in a classic
"buoy" shape.

I hesitate to admit the following, because – despite heroic attempts at self-delusion – it might reveal just how uncool I really am.

But in reality, that ship sailed long ago, right about the time my kids became teenagers, so what the hell. . .

I cannot lie, I am an Old Spice man.

Taking brand loyalty a little too far, I have persisted in using the same kind of Old Spice deodorant (“original scent”) that I first applied to my armpits as a rank teenager decades ago.

Finns, probably unfamiliar with this “legacy” nautical-themed line of men’s toiletries, might not realize that Old Spice is old school in the extreme, kind of “your father’s” aftershave and deo. I’ve often felt that for the under-fifty crowd, the subtle message of my favorite grooming products isn’t so much “rugged, manly, tamer of the seven seas”, but rather “geezer”.

Despite this, I've chosen to stay in this deo rut, which isn't to do in Finland where, until recently, it was not possible to buy Old Spice (I’m not sure it can be found even now).

This lack of Old Spice in Suomi, plus my crippling inability to consider using anything else, has forced me to stock up whenever I’m in the States. On every trip to the US, I eventually show up at the checkout counter in some Wal-Mart with about a dozen or more sticks of brightly red packaged deodorant. Not surprisingly, buying a two-year supply of the stuff all at once elicits some intriguing looks from the female cashiers – and not the “come hither” kind.

So it was also on my recent visit to New York a few weeks ago. After I got back to Helsinki with my newest stash, I noticed that the marketing folks at Old Spice seem to have embraced the brand’s heritage and its retro reputation. Printed on the back of the deo container is the slightly cheeky message:  

Who knows, maybe Old Spice is becoming cool again. Good thing I didn’t switch to something else.