Matti Nykänen
Ski jumper who was regarded as the greatest ever but who struggled to find happiness in retirement
MATTI NYKÄNEN, who has died aged 55, was the greatest ski jumper who ever lived. The baby-faced “Flying Finn” won four Olympic and five World Championship gold medals, but found retirement harder to handle. Having struggled with a drink problem since his teens, he had six marriages (twice with the same woman), tried to make it as a pop star, porn star and stripper, and wound up in jail several times. Yet through it all he remained a fixture in the affections of the Finnish people.
“He’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” his biographer, Egon Theiner, said. “When sober, he’s one of the nicest and friendliest people I’ve ever met. When drunk, he’s dangerous and aggressive.”
Matti Ensio Nykänen was born at Jyväskylä in Finland on July 17 1963. His father, Ensio, was a milkman and taxi driver, while his mother, Vieno, had a market stall selling fruit and vegetables. Diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, he was eight when his father dared him to try their local ski jump.
Matti was hooked, and he was soon making 2-3,000 jumps a year, training for nine hours a day. A few months before his 11th birthday he won his first age group competition. The country’s leading coach, Matti Pulli, took him on, employing new training techniques such as jumping in weighted vests.
In February 1981 Nykänen took gold in the world junior championships, and nine months later won his first World Cup event. His first World Cup title came in 1983, and at the 1984 Olympic Games in Sarajevo he took silver on the normal hill and gold on the large hill; his 17.5pt winning margin remains the largest in Olympic history.
“No one could really touch him,” recalled one left-behind rival, the Canadian, Steve Collins. “He did stuff no one else did.”
Four years later, at the Calgary Olympics, although Eddie the Eagle might have stolen the headlines, Nykänen dominated the event, doing what no other ski jumper had ever done, winning gold on both large and normal hills, as well as team gold. In both individual events his lead over the silver medallists was larger than the points difference between second and 10th place.
Observers struggled to analyse the reasons for Nykänen’s dominance. He was not especially fast down the slope, and his unorthodox style sometimes saw him marked down in the style category. But his take-offs were perfect and – like Michael Jordan in basketball – he had the knack of seeming to stay longer in the air. For some experts, his shape was the thing: slim yet broad, his frame acted like a sail, they said, catching the wind and sending him soaring.
“His structure was excellent, he had very good thrust and he was persistent,” Pulli said, adding: “He was childlike, almost like a cherub, and that charmed people.”
As well as his Olympic medal haul, Nykänen won five golds, a silver and three bronzes at world championships between 1982 and 1989, as well as a gold, a silver and three bronzes at the Ski Flying world championships (similar to ski jumping, but with a slope designed to send the jumper further).
He retired in 1991 after finishing a miserable 50th in the world championship, with 46 individual World Cup wins to his name. As countless sportspeople have found, life without his drug of choice was a grim prospect: “For all my life I had been doing something else, and now that did not matter any longer.”
Even while he was still competing Nykänen had had the air of the wild child. In 1986, at the height of his career, he had received a suspended sentence for stealing cigarettes and beer from a kiosk, and he was twice dropped from Finland’s national squad for bad behaviour.
In retirement, things got worse: by 2000 he had been married and divorced three times, before meeting a sausage heiress, Mervi Tapola. He was subject to a restraining order after assaulting her, but in 2001 they married anyway. In 2004 he was given a suspended sentence for assaulting her again, and in 2006 he was jailed for 26 months after stabbing a family friend who had just beaten him in a finger-wrestling competition.
He was released after 11 months for good behaviour but re-arrested four days later for another attack on Mervi Tapola, for which he was imprisoned for four months in 2006. Soon after his release he stabbed a man in a pizza restaurant.
On Christmas Day 2009 he injured his wife with a kitchen knife and tried to throttle her with a dressing-gown belt. In August 2010 he was sentenced to 16 months in prison and ordered to pay her 5,000 euros in compensation and 3,000 euros for legal costs.
As Nykänen’s ski-jumping career was reaching its end, a consortium of businessmen had attempted to turn him into a pop star. His first album, released in 1992, sold 25,000 copies, but the follow-up saw sales fall away. There was an abortive comeback in 2002, but not before he had worked as a stripper in a restaurant. Other jobs included working for a phone-sex line and acting in a pornographic film.
In 2006, the biopic Matti: Hell is for Heroes, was the year’s most-watched film in Finland; he performed some of the songs on the soundtrack himself. In 2018 he was told he had diabetes, but he had recently picked up his music career again.
In 1986 Matti Nykänen married Tiina Hassinen a month after meeting her. They had a son, from whom Nykänen is estranged, but were divorced in 1988. The following year he married Pia Hynninen; they had a daughter but divorced in 1991. He also had another daughter from a onenight stand. From 1996 to 1998 he was married to Sari Paanala; he waited on tables and sang karaoke to attract customers to her restaurant.
Nykänen and Mervi Tapola were twice married and divorced; in a relationship marked by violence, she filed for divorce 15 times before they eventually parted for good. In 2014 he married a former actress, Pia Talonpoika. She survives him, along with his children.
Matti Nykänen sold his Olympic medals to the Sports Museum of Finland, where they remain on show.
Matti Nykänen, born July 17 1963, died February 4 2019