Matti Nykänen
Finnish ski jumper BORN JULY 17, 1963 – DIED FEBRUARY 4, 2019, AGED 55
THE “Flying Finn” Matti Nykänen made the UK’s home-grown ski jumper Eddie the Eagle look like a cardboard cut-out.
Married six times – twice to the same woman – the daredevil’s alcoholfuelled personal life was every bit as colourful as his sporting career.
Nykänen won four gold medals at the Winter Olympics, three of them at the 1988 Winter Games in Canada, as well as nine gold World Championship medals.
Widely considered the greatest male ski jumper of all time and famous for apparently defying gravity by riding the wind, he had an eventful life away from the slopes.
He once stabbed a man in a pizza restaurant, worked as a stripper, appeared on a Korean postage stamp, launched an internet cooking show, released several albums as a singer and threatened to throttle wife number four (who was also wife number five) with a bathrobe belt – an incident which saw him charged with attempted manslaughter.
The charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence but in 2009 he was convicted of grievous bodily harm and sentenced to 16 months in prison.
This followed a 26-month sentence in 2004 following the stabbing incident in which he was found guilty of aggravated assault after losing to a family friend in a “Fingerhakeln” finger-pulling competition in which competitors try to pull each other over a table by linking index fingers, which is popular in Scandinavia for settling disputes.
Several of his pop songs were named after his most famous quotes, including “Maybe I did [drink], maybe I didn’t”. Diagnosed with diabetes last year, his later life was beset by financial problems.