Decathlon Blog

European Championships are held next year in Gothenburg and at Ullevi. The stadium is perfect for the games. Just one small minor thing got my eye: officials’ instruments are a bit old-fashioned. Compared to Helsinki where everything was automatic this looks funny. In addition to what is shown in the picture they were using measuring [...]

My team got a lot of new young athletes after the World Championships. The amount of children has almost gotten tenfold in two weeks time! Hopefully they will keep up the good hobby and not get tired of it in the next two weeks. Luckily Evilä brought Finland one medal otherwise there maybe wouldn’t have [...]

Visited yesterday first time the renewed Eläintarha field. Must say it looked good. I didn’t run on the track though. Only obvious “mistake” seems to be that the the shot put sectors are crossing. One has to be a bit careful so that a shot won’t hit anyone.

Men’s match turned for Finland and Sweden won all others. Susanna Kallur was the Swedish star. Klüft jumped 692 but was injured in the hurdles. Hopefully nothing serious.
Trip was nice. Hopefully we’ll be here for next year’s European Championships.

Evilä did a new Finnish record 819 but that wasn’t enough for him and he jumped 820 (+2.9) (in the picture). Sun shined but it doesn’t anymore. Now it’s mostly raining.
Sweden will win women’s match but on men’s side it’s tight.

Let’s see where you all come from (if there are any readers on this blog). All kind of cool stuff can be done with Google Maps. Gvisit is a nice service that locates the latest 20 (100 if you donate) visitors for your site using Google maps. I subsribed to that as well today (in [...]

Trying out some ways how to save disk space on my site. I have now established a photo album at flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/decathlon/. Link is also on the right panel of this blog. I only need to send one email to flickr and it will forward the post to my blog. I must say that flickr [...]

I’m heading to Gothenburg on the weekend to watch if Finland has any changes against Sweden in our yearly fight. Three athletes from both countries in each event (no decathlon or heptathlon though). Sweden won last year both on women’s and men’s overall competition but usually it has been really tight. There is a small [...]

L’Equipe has a news today that Lance Armstrong has been tested positive for EPO in 1999 Tour de France. Some urine doping samples where examined again and six samples from Lance showed marks of EPO usage. Let’s see how this evolves. Lance has denied all accusations at his homepage (register to read the short comments). [...]

Yesterday I trained for the first time since Finnish Championships (that is for a month). I jogged for an hour in the woods. Muscles are a bit tired but I guess they will get used to training in a week or so. I still have couple of competitions left so I’ll try to get back [...]