Paavo Nurmi - Legacy

Legacy

Nurmi broke 22 official world records on distances between 1,500 m and 20 km; a record in running. He also set several more unofficial ones for a total of 58. His indoor world records were all unofficial as the IAAF did not ratify indoor records until the 1980s. Nurmi's record for most Olympic gold medals was matched by gymnast Larisa Latynina in 1964, swimmer Mark Spitz in 1972 and fellow track and field athlete Carl Lewis in 1996, and broken by swimmer Michael Phelps in 2008. Nurmi's record for most medals in the Olympic Games stood until Edoardo Mangiarotti won his 13th medal in fencing in 1960. Time selected Nurmi as the greatest Olympian of all time in 1996, and IAAF named him among the first twelve athletes to be inducted into the IAAF Hall of Fame in 2012.

Nurmi introduced the "even pace" strategy to running, pacing himself with a stopwatch and spreading his energy uniformly over the race. He reasoned that "when you race against time, you don't have to sprint. Others can't hold the pace if it is steady and hard all through to the tape." Archie Macpherson stated that "with the stopwatch always in his hand, he elevated athletics to a new plane of intelligent application of effort and was the harbinger of the modern scientifically prepared athlete." Nurmi was considered a pioneer also in regards to training; he developed a systematic all-year-round training program that included both long-distance work and interval running. Peter Lovesey wrote in The Kings of Distance: A Study of Five Great Runners that Nurmi "accelerated the progress of world records; developed and actually came to personify the analytic approach to running; and he was a profound influence not only in Finland, but throughout the world of athletics. Nurmi, his style, technique and tactics were held to be infallible, and really seemed so, as successive imitators in Finland steadily improved the records." Cordner Nelson, founder of Track & Field News, credited Nurmi for popularizing running as a spectator sport: "His imprint on the track world was greater than any man’s before or after. He, more than any man, raised track to the glory of a major sport in the eyes of international fans, and they honored him as one of the truly great athletes of all sports.

Nurmi's achievements and training methods inspired future track stars of many generations. Emil Zátopek chanted "I am Nurmi! I am Nurmi!" when he trained as a child, and based his training system on what he was able to find out about Nurmi's methods. Lasse Virén idolized Nurmi and was scheduled to meet him for the first time on the day that Nurmi died. Hicham El Guerrouj was inspired to become a runner so that he could "repeat the achievements of the great man of whom his grandfather spoke." He became the first man after Nurmi to win the 1,500 m and the 5,000 m at the same Games. Nurmi's influence stretched further than running on the Olympic arena. At the 1928 Olympics, Kazimierz Wierzyński won the lyric gold medal with his poem Olympic Laurel that included a verse on Nurmi. In 1936, Ludwig Stubbendorf and his horse Nurmi won the individual and team gold medals in eventing.

A bronze statue of Nurmi was sculpted by Wäinö Aaltonen in 1925. The original is held at the art museum Ateneum, but copies cast from the original mould exist in Turku, in Jyväskylä, in front of the Helsinki Olympic Stadium and at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. In a widely-publicided prank by the students of the Helsinki University of Technology, a miniature copy of the statue was discovered from the 300-year-old wreck of the Swedish war ship Vasa when it was lifted from the bottom of the sea in 1961. Statues of Nurmi were also sculpted by Renée Sintenis in 1926 and by Carl Eldh, whose 1937 work Löpare (Runners) depicts a battle between Nurmi and Edvin Wide. Boken om Nurmi (A Book of Nurmi), released in Sweden in 1925, was the first biographical book on a Finnish sportsman. Finnish astronomer Yrjö Väisälä named the main belt asteroid 1740 Paavo Nurmi after Nurmi in 1939, while Finnair named its first DC-8 Paavo Nurmi in 1969. Nurmi's former rival Ville Ritola boarded the plane when he moved back to Finland in 1970.

Paavo Nurmi Marathon, held annually since 1969, is the oldest marathon in Wisconsin and the second-oldest in the American Midwest. In Finland, another marathon bearing the name has been held in Nurmi's hometown of Turku since 1992, along with the athletics competition Paavo Nurmi Games that was started in 1957. Finlandia University, an American college with Finnish roots, named their athletic center after Nurmi. A ten-mark bill featuring a portrait of Nurmi was issued by the Bank of Finland in 1987. The other revised bills honored architect Alvar Aalto, composer Jean Sibelius, Enlightenment thinker Anders Chydenius and author Elias Lönnrot, respectively. The Nurmi bill was replaced by a new 20-mark note featuring Väinö Linna in 1993. In 1997, a historic stadium in Turku was renamed the Paavo Nurmi Stadium. Twenty world records have been set at the stadium, including John Landy's records on the 1,500 m and the mile, Nurmi's record on the 3,000 m and Zátopek's record on the 10,000 m. In fiction, Nurmi appears in William Goldman's 1974 novel Marathon Man as the idol of the protagonist, who aims to become a greater runner than Nurmi. An opera on Nurmi, written by Paavo Haavikko and composed by Tuomas Kantelinen, debuted at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium in 2000. In a 2005 episode of The Simpsons, Mr. Burns brags that he once outraced Nurmi in his antique motorcar.