'Crazy' Finns and their spirit of competition

Let me just say there’s nothing like a good old ethnic feud to get people revved up.

Two weeks ago I asked Inter Lake readers for Swedish jokes to use as ammunition for my Swedish co-worker who broke the news to me that Swedes and Norwegians are archrivals. My e-mail in-box was filled with both Norwegian and Swedish jokes, which, truth be known, are pretty interchangeable.

Here are a couple:

• You know when you’re in a Swedish neighborhood when you see sap buckets hanging on telephone poles.

• Norwegians can be trained, you just have to catch them when they’re young.

• There was this Norwegian who was fishing by the side of the lake. When a Swede happened along, he came up to the Norwegian and asked: “If I can guess how many fish you have in your creel, can I have one?” The Norwegian answered, “if you guess right you can have both!” And so the Swede guessed three.

• Why do Norwegians use glass garbage cans? So the Swedes can go window shopping!  

A few of you asked if I was going to write about “those crazy Finlanders,” to cover all the Scandinavian bases.

I grew up in a really Norwegian area of Minnesota, so my knowledge of Finlanders, let alone “crazy” Finlanders is pretty limited. But when I worked as a reporter in Detroit Lakes, there were plenty of Finnish people living in the woods to the east (places like Frazee, New York Mills and Osage) with impossible surnames to spell and pronounce.

Most of them were cross-country skiers and had saunas. I don’t recall any of them being crazy, per se, but then again these are watered-down American Finlanders.

My limited research indicates that Finnish people do have a passion for crazy contests, though. Perttu Haikkinen (see what I mean about the names?), a columnist for the Helsingin Sanomat, wrote a probing piece two years ago about why Finland has such a thirst for wacky activities such as mobile-phone throwing contest and swamp soccer.

First off, Haikkinen notes that his country is renowned for several reasons: mass-produced mobile phones, lakes — 190,000 of them — and boiling hot saunas. Finland also claims Santa Claus.

It seems nothing is off-limits for a Finnish competition. Their list includes boot throwing, wife carrying, mosquito slapping, sauna endurance contests and — even more bizarre — sitting naked on an ant’s nest.

Harri Kinnunen, organizer of Finland’s boot-throwing world championships, weighed in with this tongue-in-cheek observation: “I guess all Finnish summer sports were invented by drunk people.”

Haikkinen explained it like this: Almost every Finnish family has a summer cottage “where it hides every summer to escape annoying neighbors and noisy urban racket.

“But after a few days of relaxing country life, some Finns get bored. Activities like fishing, boozing or swimming lose their magic. Then it’s time to call up the annoying neighbors (or relatives) again, ask them to come over and get them to engage in some kind of contest. Toilet-paper throwing, for example.”

The annual wife-carrying world championships draw crowds of up to 9,000 spectators. No word on how that actually got started, but Kinnunen was honest about the origin of boot throwing, confiding to Haikkinen that “I think it’s pretty obvious that some drunken people were sitting on a terrace after a sauna and saw a rubber boot.

“Yeah, I know what the foreigners think,” he added. “Those crazy Finns!”

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.