Daily winners 28.6.

Club Class
Rasmus Ørskov 1F, Denmark
Standard Class
Sebastian Kawa I, Poland
20 m  Multi-Seat Class
Steve Jones & Howard Jones CUS, Great Britain

Tasks and results:
www.wgc2014.fi/results

IGC-files

Upload IGC-file to scoring »

Weather

• EFRY weather station
• RASPtable
• Helsinki Testbed
• Aviation Weather
• ilmanet.fi
  user: efrymet
  pw: mmkisa2014

Partners

Site of the First Gliding Olympics

by Jyri Raivio

Weather permitting, it’s quite possible that the tasks of the 33rd World Championships take pilots over the airfield of Jämijärvi, some 60 km NW from Tampere, one of the larger cities of the country.  If any of you pilots do get there, take a close look!  Jämijärvi (or Jämi, for short) is like no other site in the history of gliding.  Even up until today it’s the only one chosen to host Olympic Games in the sport of gliding.¸

This remarkable but not very well known piece of gliding history took place in the late 1930s.  The International Olympic Committee IOC had awarded Finland, and Helsinki, the right to host the Olympic Games in 1940.  This decision was taken as late as 1938 when the original organizer Tokyo withdrew.

Gliding had already been an exhibition event in the Berlin Games in 1936.  Germany, the home of modern gliding, had lobbied hard for the sport to be included in the official program and had then succeeded in her efforts: in 1938 the IOC decided that gliding was to be a part of the 1940 Summer Olympics.  The medals were supposed to be awarded based on a period of 14 days of flying in July to August.

Right from the beginning it was clear that the Olympic gliding could not be organized in Helsinki.  Jämijärvi was the obvious choice, the site having been found in a public contest a few years earlier.  The contest had been sponsored by Suomen Kuvalehti, which, by the way, was and still is one of the most prestigious weekly newsmagazines in Finland.  The target of the contest had been to find an ideal gliding location for bungee launches, which in those days were the training method used.

Jämi met the requirements, both geographically and weatherwise.  There is a hill, not an impressive one in the eyes of southerners, but a hill anyway.  And the terrain of heather-growing dry moorland is as good for thermal activity as any in this country.

The first gliding courses at Jämijärvi had been organized in the summer of 1935.  A group of instructors came from Germany and in it were included some legendary names like Hanna ”Die Hanna” Reitsch and the met man Joachim Küttner.

The site and its activities grew very fast.  Historian Mikko Uola tells in his History of the Finnish Aeronautical Association that the summer of 1938 saw some 324 student pilots at Jämi.  They could use 20 gliders, including 12 Grunau 9 primary gliders.  The more advanced pilots could use aerotow, ie. three Klemm towplanes.  Just before the war Jämijärvi was the leading gliding site in all of Scandinavia.

The Olympics were supposed to raise the activities at Jämi to new heights.  A new road, technical building and hangar were being constructed as a preparation for the big event.  A group of 23 pilots was chosen for Olympic training.  They had at their disposal three ultramodern Weihe single-seaters and a Kranich two-seater.  The Olympic training camp was held in July to August 1939.  Based on its results three pilots were chosen to represent Finland in the Gliding Olympics.

The contest was to be flown in one class, as a matter of fact in one type of glider only.  The technical and scientific organization of gliding of the period, the ISTUS (the predecessor to today’s Ostiv), organized an international design contest.  The winner was DFS Meise from Germany, which was then appropriately renamed Olympia.

Everything came to an abrupt and tragic stop in the fall of 1939.  On November 30th the Soviet Union attacked Finland and started a 105 day long Winter War.  After that the rest of the world plunged into the Second World War and the Helsinki Olympics, including gliding at Jämijärvi, were promptly cancelled.

Helsinki got her Games after the war, in 1952, but no one mentioned gliding anymore.  And ever since then none of the air sports have appeared in the Summer Olympics.

Many people would like to change that.  Some decades ago the possibility of including gliding in the Olympic program was brought up in the FAI’s Gliding Commission CIVV (the present-day IGC).  But even if there is a will, there might not be a way: the Games have grown into mammoth proportions and there is a clear tendency to cut current small disciplines away, rather than to include new ones.

The motivation to get into the Olympics was, and still is, clear.  Some see the Games as a highway to huge media visibility and a pot of gold.  The amount of money circulating around the five famous rings is unbelievable and the Games are perhaps the most widely covered single event in the world’s media.

Past experience in Finland shows, however, that a small sport remains small even after gaining access to the Olympic programme.  If a Finn wins one of the coveted gold medals, media publicity is guaranteed during the Games and even after, but not for long.  Olympic sports receive public funding and general attention but a vast majority of that goes go to the big, traditional sports like track and field.

So, should gliding be an Olympic sport?  Ponder on this question for a moment when flying above Jämi, the world’s only site chosen to host Olympic gliding.