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Nature Boys, Supermen, Fanatics: Perspectives on Finnishness in Three Sports Novels

This paper focuses on the ideological function of sport in Finland through the study of three novels. It argues that the Olympic Games brought Finland fame as a sporting nation, especially in athletics, in which Finnish long-distance runners harvested more than 40 Olympic medals between 1912 and 1936. The paper shows that the novels enable us to grasp the nationalist charge in the Finnish worship of athletics in general and long-distance running in particular. It points out how it gradually lost its ideological credibility and how it was eventually transformed into an idée fixe and finally became something of a grotesque joke. The novels in question were published in 1936, 1978 and 2009. The comparative reading of sports novels from three different epochs in Finnish history brings to the fore the societal contexts in which they were written.