Yesterday I witnessed how the national football team gave away a match against Denmark two minutes before the finishing whistle. This particular match was meaningless, but it followed an age-old pattern. Last-minute shocks resulting in defeat have become part of the national cultural heritage. In the last decade, it is the football team that has really come to symbolize this tendency in international sport (although it was originally established and is still occasionally well preserved by the ice hockey team, catastrophes against Sweden in the world championships of 1986, 1991, and 2003 being the best examples).

Finland has played some fantastic matches in recent years, beating e.g. both finalists of the last European championships clearly, Greece 5-1 in 2001 and Portugal 4-1 in an away game in 2002. I was enthusiastically congratulated for the latter achievement in a Manhattan deli a few months after the game. Many of us still tremble with delight while thinking of a night in Istanbul in 1998. Nevertheless, the last minute disasters have a more enduring power in the domestic collective mind. Living abroad, I had no opportunity to watch the crucial Hungary match in 1997 or the by now infamous Czech match this spring, but I've heard enough. The former I've also seen on video, and it had all the elements of an epic tragedy (a looming victory, a referee's error in overtime, and a simply unbelievable series of chain reactions leading to the equalizing own goal).

But the tragic figures are the greatest, aren't they? We know Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello well. Who remembers even the names of Shakespeare's comic heroes?

Matti Nykänen and Juha Mieto are two Finnish heroes of individual sports who have acquired something like mythical status in the last few decades. Four-time Olympic champion Nykänen didn't lose very often during his active ski jumping career; now he is remembered mainly because of his spectacular fall from grace afterwards (that site is hilarious, unfortunately only summarised in English). Presently the man is in prison. Mieto won a lot in cross country skiing, but nothing really big individually. While his enormous physical size and personality (I've spent a few hours in the same room, and both really are huge) and eccentric stunts (e.g. skiing straight into the sauna from the finishing line after a bad race, with all the equipment on) may explain part of the reputation, the main reason is the fact that he suffered the most incomprehensibly narrow defeat in Olympic history. He lost the bronze by .06 seconds in Sapporo in 1972 - good preparation for 1980, when Thomas Wassberg beat him for gold by one hundredth of a second. In a 42-minute race during which they had no contact whatsoever with each other.

There's something so grand, so sublime, in that kind of loss that it simply fills one with awe. To win such a race is almost nothing in comparison (though some Swedes might disagree). The heroic and tragic qualities of a larger-than-life figure were amplified through the defeat, especially since he took it so gracefully. He cried a bit, took a moment in solitude, and then congratulated the winner, subsequently refusing all tentative offers on sharing the gold. The true and brave tragic hero has a strong sense of fate. He understands the aesthetic side of agony. He may scream at the windmills when alone but shows little desperation or self-pity in public. He finds strength in melancholy. He sees the beauty of not winning, of dying, of not being able to prevent the last-minute goal, of not getting the girl. He embraces loss in all its sublimity. He turns it into an inner poetry. 16:21