Paavo Nurmi - Personal Life and Public Image

Personal Life and Public Image

He was married to socialite Sylvi Laaksonen from 1932 to 1935. Laaksonen, who was not interested in athletics, opposed Nurmi raising their newborn son Matti to be a runner and stated to the Associated Press in 1933 that "his concentration on athletics at last forced me to go to the judge for a divorce." Matti Nurmi did become a middle-distance runner, and later a "self-made" businessman. Nurmi's relationship with his son was termed to be "uneasy". Matti admired his father more as a businessman than as an athlete, and the two never discussed his running career. As a runner, Matti was at his best at the 3,000 m, where he equaled his father's time. On the famous race on 11 July 1957 when the "three Olavis" (Salsola, Salonen and Vuorisalo) broke the world record for the 1,500 m, Matti Nurmi finished a distant ninth with his personal best, 2.2 seconds slower than his father's world record from 1924. Hollywood actress Maila Nurmi, best known as the horror icon "Vampira", was often referred to as Paavo Nurmi's niece. However, the kinship is not supported by official documents.

Nurmi enjoyed the Finnish sports massage and sauna-bathing traditions, crediting the Finnish sauna for his performances during the Paris heat wave in 1924. He had a versatile diet, although he had practiced vegetarianism between the ages of 15 and 21. Nurmi, who identified as neurasthenic, was known to be "taciturn", "stony-faced" and "stubborn". He was not believed to have had any close friends, but he had occasionally socialized and showed his "sarcastic sense of humour" among the small circles he knew. Acclaimed the biggest sporting figure in the world at his peak, Nurmi was averse to publicity and the media, stating later on his 75th birthday that "worldly fame and reputation are worth less than a rotten lingonberry." French journalist Gabriel Hanot questioned Nurmi's intensive approach to sports and wrote in 1924 that Nurmi "is ever more serious, reserved, concentrated, pessimistic, fanatic. There is such coldness in him and his self-control is so great that never for a moment does he show his feelings." Some contemporary Finns nicknamed him Suuri vaikenija (The Great Silent One), and Ron Clarke noted that Nurmi's persona remained a mystery even to Finnish runners and journalists: "Even to them, he was never quite real. He was enigmatic, sphinx-like, a god in a cloud. It was as if he was all the time playing a role in a drama."

Nurmi was more responsive to his fellow athletes than to the media. He exchanged ideas with sprinter Charley Paddock and even trained with his rival Otto Peltzer. Nurmi told Peltzer to forget his opponents: "Conquering yourself is the greatest challenge of an athlete." Nurmi was known to emphasize the importance of psychological strength: "Mind is everything; muscle, pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind." Regarding Nurmi's track antics, Peltzer found that "in his impenetrability he was a Buddha gliding on the track. Stopwatch in hand, lap after lap, he ran towards the tape, subject only to the laws of a mathematical table." Marathoner Johnny Kelley, who first met his idol at the 1936 Olympics, said that while Nurmi appeared cold to him at first, the two chatted for quite a while after Nurmi had asked for his name: "He grabbed ahold of me — he was so excited. I couldn't believe it!"

Nurmi's speed and elusive personality led to nicknames such as the "Phantom Finn", the "King of Runners" and "Peerless Paavo", while his mathematical prowess and use of a stopwatch led the press to characterize him as a running machine. One newspaperman dubbed Nurmi "a mechanical Frankenstein created to annihilate time." Phil Cousineau noted that "his own innovation — the tactic of pacing himself with a stopwatch — both inspired and troubled people in an era when the robot was becoming symbolic of the modern soulless human being." Among the popular newspaper rumours about Nurmi was that he had a "freakish heart" with a very low pulse rate. During the debate over his amateur status, Nurmi was joked to have "the lowest heartbeat and the highest asking price of any athlete in the world."