Some Olympians are born to run fast, others simply force themselves. Paavo Nurmi was one of the latter, a man of such iron will and fierce discipline that nobody hoping to survive on talent alone could dream of coming near him. In 1958, when he looked back over his athletic career, he said that the one thing it had taught him was that there are “neither unbeatable records nor human limits”. And in his world, at least, it was true.

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The Finnish have a word, sisu, which has no straightforward English translation. It describes a spirit, an internal force that encompasses strength of will, determination, courage and perseverance. It is a quality that Nurmi embodied, and had to: he was born in poverty, the eldest of five children, the entire family living in one cramped room. “He was brought up on a diet of black bread and dried fish, with fresh meat and fruit as a very occasional treat,” The Guardian once wrote of his childhood. “To get to school he had to walk many miles each day in summer; in the winter, when snow lay deep, the journey was made upon skis.”

That was until he was 12 and stopped going to school, after his father died of haemoptysis and he became the family’s chief breadwinner. He got a job as an errand boy for a bakery, dragging carts and lugging sacks around his home town of Turku, and then moved on to work in a foundry. In 1919, the first year of his military service, Nurmi and the rest of his army unit set off on a 12.5-mile march in full equipment, each soldier carrying a rifle, a cartridge belt and a backpack full of sand. There were rewards for the winners, so at least at the start they tried to walk briskly, even if few managed to sustain that pace for long. Nurmi ran the entire route. Within a year he was representing his country in the Olympics.

Strange as it may seem now, Nurmi entered sport at a point when no nation was as successful at producing long-distance runners as Finland, still high from the success of Hannes Kolehmainen at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. But Nurmi’s achievements had nothing to do with teamwork. He was a vicious character, a man of few words and fewer friends. He rarely looked at his rivals, let alone engaged them in conversation. “The thing which disheartened his opponents more than anything else was his icy self-containment,” the Guardian wrote, after his retirement. “He paid no attention to his opponents before, during or after the race; he never spoke and he never smiled. The sheer inhumanity of the man broke the hearts of those who had to run against him.”

He died aged 76 after building a small fortune in property and spending his last years living alone in a Helsinki flat and stuttering silently around town leaning on a cane, a recluse. On his 75th birthday he submitted himself to a rare interview. “Worldly fame and reputation are worth less than a rotten lingonberry,” he said.

He had one son, Matti, but they were never particularly close. Nurmi had married a society belle in 1932, the daughter of a mill owner, a development that astonished many and kept Finnish gossips in material for weeks. But the union was over in less than two years, partly because of his “extreme taciturnity”, and partly because of an unusual level of disappointment in the size of his newborn son’s feet. “Paavo measured them, and said he was not satisfied,” his wife explained after their separation. “He wanted the boy to become a runner, but I am fiercely opposed to that. Paavo even tried to arrange the boy’s food so that Matti should be strengthened for athletics, but those feet have not stretched at all.”

Precisely the same traits that made him so unsuited to family life made him highly successful, first as an athlete and later as a businessman. His running was utterly methodical, normally accomplished – even in Olympic finals – with a stopwatch in his hand so he could be absolutely certain that he was achieving the desired speed. The fashion at the time was for athletes to start a race quickly, cover most of the distance at slow speed and then sprint for the finish. Nurmi changed it completely, reeling off lap after lap at precisely the same pace. “What is there about this phlegmatic Finn that makes him the superior of every other athlete who has ever pulled on a spiked shoe?” asked the Guardian in 1925. “He is slight, fair-haired, sometimes moody, and always temperamental. He has magnificent thighs and nicely-rounded calves, but there is nothing about him that suggests the super-man the stop-watches have proved him to be.”

The answer was in his head. It was tactics, training and temperament that turned Nurmi from hermit to hero, and made him so famous that the great Czech athlete Emil Zatopek, who would succeed him as the world’s dominant long-distance runner in the 1940s and 50s, spent his youth shouting “I am Nurmi! I am Nurmi!” during his most difficult moments in training.

But the Finn’s Olympic introduction was mildly disappointing, with the Frenchman Joseph Guillemot overtaking him on the final lap to win the 5,000m in 1920. The next time he failed to win an Olympic race, though, was eight years and nine gold medals later.

He was impressive in Antwerp, adding golds in the 10,000m, the cross-country and the team cross-country, but his performance at the 1924 Olympics was so astonishing that it bends the very extremes of plausibility. The scheduling had not gone in his favour, with the finals of two of his events, the 5,000m and 1,500m, set for the same afternoon, less than 90 minutes apart. He was still confident of completing the double, and with good reason. On hearing news of the clash he scheduled a test, held three weeks before the main event, at the Elaintarha stadium in Helsinki. There he smashed the seven-year-old 1500m world record, and less than an hour later broke his own world record in the 5,000m by 7.2 seconds.

So he entered both events. On Tuesday 8 July, after his 5,000m heat, the Guardian wrote that he “won as he pleased without ever exerting himself”. In the following day’s 1500m heat he “won as he wanted”. Then on Thursday he “won both, one after the other, without being pressed in either”. In the 1500m he missed the world record by a second, and then he took the 5,000m “without apparent exertion”. That’s four races and two gold medals in three days, and he didn’t stop there: on the Friday he competed in the heats of the 3,000m team track race, “as usual winning as and when he pleased”.

Saturday brought the 10,000m cross-country, an event that was to prove so grisly that it was immediately and permanently dropped from the Olympic schedules. “It was a day of such intense heat that of 42 starters less than a dozen finished,” the Guardian reported. “The rest were picked up unconscious all along the course, and the ambulances were out for hours afterwards.”

One French athlete made it to the stadium for the final lap, but lost his bearings and started to run round and round in tight circles. Suddenly he snapped out of his trance and set off once again at great speed, but was so disoriented he sprinted into the stands and knocked himself unconscious. Nurmi, running his sixth race in five days, came home a minute and a half ahead of his closest rival and apparently untroubled. Then on Sunday came the final of the 3,000m team race, which he won by 100 yards apparently without exertion, setting a new Olympic record.

But despite this epic feat of endurance Nurmi’s only complaint was that he had not run enough. He had developed an instant and intense rivalry with his compatriot Ville Ritola, even though the pair had not met before they arrived in Paris (Ritola had moved to America aged 17). Organisers attempted to keep them apart, but when Ritola alone was chosen for the 10,000m track race the spurned Nurmi was so furious that he took to the warm-up track next to the stadium and ran the same distance at the same time. Ritola won gold with a world record, but just outside Nurmi had finished first. When they did compete, in the 5,000m and the cross-country, Ritola managed only silver.

“He reduced the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris to a farce, a series of exhibition races,” wrote the Guardian. “In race after race Nurmi would reel off lap after lap, never varying his pace or stride by a fraction, drawing inexorably farther and farther away. He would win by the length of a street, and a blue and white flag would go fluttering up the flagstaff and everybody would stand to attention while the band played the Finnish national anthem. Everybody, that is to say, except Nurmi, for Nurmi would not be there. He did not stop when he had broken the tape; he ran straight to where his clothes were lying on the grass, picked them up, and ran on into the dressing-room. And that was the last we saw of him until the next massacre was due to take place.”

The rivalry with Ritola resumed on the first day of the 1928 games, when Nurmi stormed to victory in the 10,000m, beating his countryman’s Olympic record, set four years earlier, by more than six seconds and ending the race “looking almost as fresh as when he had started”. But that was to be his final taste of Olympic glory. Ritola beat him into second place in the 5,000m. Then in the steeplechase – an event to which Nurmi was so unsuited that the crowd laughed at him in the heats when he fell flat on his face in the water jump – he again came second, behind Toivo Loukola, another Finn, with Ritola not finishing the race.

By now he had 12 Olympic medals, nine of them gold, won over distances ranging from 1,500m to 10,000m, but he turned his attention to the marathon and discovered that it was his best event of all. “Some of his trial times were almost unbelievable,” reported the Guardian, as he prepared for the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. But Sweden’s Olympic Committee had other ideas, reporting him to the IOC for receiving so much compensation for travelling expenses on one of his absurdly successful American tours, and claiming that he had essentially become a professional. Finland fought his ban long and hard, and Nurmi travelled with the team to America, but he accepted defeat two days before the Games began.

Nurmi blamed the Swedes and the press in equal measure for his banishment, and forgave neither. But redemption of sorts came in 1952, when the Helsinki Olympics began with him carrying the torch into the stadium and lighting the flame. His appearance, after years away from the limelight and in front of an audience of fellow Finns, moved many in the stadium to tears.

Nurmi was once asked how it felt to represent his country. “I ran for myself, not for Finland” he answered. But surely, the questioner continued, he must have felt different when wearing a Finnish shirt at the Olympic Games? “Not even then,” he said. “Above all, not then. At the Olympics, Paavo Nurmi mattered more than ever.”

What the Guardian said

Friday 11 July 1924

From a Special Correspondent

America and Finland again divided the honours at the Games today, and although the former scored more points, Nurmi must be credited with what is perhaps the greatest individual performance at the eight Olympiad in winning both the 1,500 metres and 5,000 metres, one after the other, without being pressed in either. His time of 3min. 53 3-5sec. for the 1,500 metres represents the mile in better time than 4min. 11sec., and if he had been pressed he would certainly have beaten his own world’s record of 3min. 52 3-5sec. In the 5,000 metres race two hours later he broke the Olympic record, running the distance in 14min. 31 1-5sec., only 3sec. more than his own world’s record.

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The 1,500 metres was a great race. Lowe sprinted ahead at the start, took the lead, and then slowed down his pace knowing that he could beat Nurmi in a spurt if the pace was not too fast. But Nurmi would have none of that. Running with a stop-watch in his hand the Finn set a pace suited to him best, and was never caught again, winning easily by three yards only as he slackened his pace at the end. Stallard was second when his foot gave way, Scharer (Switzerland) beating him on the post. Lowe was fourth. If Nurmi had ended the race at the pace at which he ran the greater part of the last lap he would have broken records, and it is quite certain that on a good track Nurmi can run a mile in 4min. 6sec. or better.

In the 5,000 metres Nurmi’s only serious rival was Ritola. At the start Nurmi allowed Ritola and Wide (Sweden) to get away gradually, and by the end of the fourth out of the ten laps the pair were leading by fifty yards. Nurmi, who had been timing his every lap, then let himself out, and in less than 300 yards was level with the leaders. He then made his own pace. Wide was easily distanced, but try as he could Ritola could not overtake his fellow-countryman, and, calmly looking over his shoulder to see how his rival was coming on, Nurmi kept a nice five yards’ distance in front, winning without apparent exertion.