Medal rain for the provinces

January 8, 2025

Where do Finland's Olympic medalists come from?

The visualization table in the article by Yle (8.2.2014) shows at a glance: Olympic medalists in individual sports come from the provinces and team athletes from the capital region. On 21.7.2021, ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, Hesari announced that there are over 60 Olympic medalists in Helsinki. “After Helsinki, the second most Finnish Olympic medalists have been born in Vyborg. Kotka, Tampere and Kuopio have also produced strong athletes”. The article shows that the statistical method chosen by HS according to the city of birth turns, for example, three-time Olympic medalist Seppo Räty into a Helsinki resident. The article was the last straw. The recent Olympics with seven Finnish medals and the joy it brought are a good reason to investigate how things really are. I sat down with my husband and calculated the medalist tables of the last century. I promise you'll be surprised too.

Finland won seven medals at the Beijing Winter Games. Five in individual sports and two in team sports. The medalists rose to the podium in individual sports due to 7 pair sprint medals. The two ice hockey medals are shared by about 50 team players. Team sports therefore produce a huge number of medalists in relation to the number of medals. That is why there are significantly more medalists in team sports than the total Finnish medal tally. Since 1924, Finland has won 167 medal places at the Winter Olympics: 155 in individual sports and only 12 in team sports. There are about 260 medalists in individual sports. About 240 medalists have participated in the medals in the 12 team sports

To get a clearer idea of where Finnish Olympic winners come from, we supplemented the table prepared by Yle on the birthplaces of Winter Games medalists with the results from Sochi, Pyeongchang and Beijing. Let's start with a look at the individual events: out of 260 medalists, only 19 medalists came from Helsinki, Vantaa won one medal, and Espoo did not win any. Six Olympic medals were won from the small municipalities of Uusimaa. When looking at the entire country, the majority of Olympic medalists come from small towns. Of course, in Northern Ostrobothnia and Lapland, the central cities have received the majority of the regional medals. However, this is probably not an exception to the picture, since most of the urban areas of Oulu and Rovaniemi are rural landscapes.

In proportion to the population, one medal was achieved in the Helsinki metropolitan area for every 51,900 inhabitants. In Helsinki, 33,247 inhabitants were needed for one medal, and in the rest of the country, only 18,720 inhabitants. So top athletes in individual sports are rarely born in the Helsinki metropolitan area and much more often outside the Helsinki metropolitan area.

What about top athletes in team sports?

Finland was quite successful in team sports at the last Olympics. It won four medals in three Olympics. Since a precise, up-to-date analysis of the birthplaces of team sport medalists would have required identifying the birthplaces of all recent medalists, I will make an estimate based on a table compiled by Yle in 2014. The table contains 160 team sport medalists to date. 52 of them are from Uusimaa. The Helsinki Metropolitan Area is evenly represented: 21 medalists come from Helsinki, 12 from Vantaa and 12 from Espoo. The Helsinki Metropolitan Area, with its 1.2 million inhabitants, therefore accounted for one quarter of the team sport medalists, which is slightly more than the proportion of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area's residents among all Finns (5.472 million in 2014).

The representation of other provinces was very uneven. There are five provinces from which no hockey players have participated in the medal matches and four provinces from which only one has. The strongest representation is from Pirkanmaa (33), Southwest Finland (16), Northern Ostrobothnia (10) and Northern Savo (10). In these provinces, the medalists are from the provincial capital: 24 from Tampere, 14 from Turku, 9 from Oulu and 10 from Kuopio.

In proportion to the population, the Helsinki Metropolitan Area achieved one medal per 23,590 inhabitants in winter team sports. In Turku, 13,950 inhabitants were enough, in Tampere 10,042 and in Kuopio 13,360. In Oulu, the ratio was the same as in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. Small and peppery Rauma has produced two medalists, Säkylä with 5,000 inhabitants one, as has Eura with 11,000 inhabitants. At a second glance, there are surprisingly many of these small towns, one or two of which have managed to become Olympic medalists, in Yle's table: more players from small ice hockey towns have risen to the level of Olympic medalists (68) than from the Helsinki Metropolitan Area (46).

In light of the medals from the Winter Olympics, it can be stated that tough athletes are being produced all over Finland. Although top-level ice hockey is concentrated in urban centers, the Helsinki metropolitan area is no better at producing team athletes than the ice hockey centers operating in the provinces. The chances of winning a medal vary greatly between regions, but talented top players also regularly emerge from rural municipalities. In individual sports, the rest of the country is better represented than the Helsinki metropolitan area. In individual sports, rural municipalities produce significantly better top athletes than central cities. If you have experienced how well sports coaching, which is run by volunteers in small communities, supports young people and helps talents flourish, you will no longer wonder why.