Finland's Sauna World Championships

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Outside Magazine, March 2005

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Out There
Hotties
It's steamy! It's seminude! It's Scandinavian! It's Finland's Sauna World Championships—and it's totally uncool.

By Lawrence Millman


	Get Stoked! Contestants at the 2004 Sauna World Championships. Leo Pusa is fourth from left. (Peter Guenzel)

THE HEAT SENT the blood screaming through my veins, and the humidity was so thick I could hardly inhale. When I did manage a breath, I could feel a scalding sensation in my throat. As the sweat cascaded off my body, I found myself thinking how nice an IRS audit would be compared with this.

I wasn't marooned in a sweltering jungle somewhere in the tropics; rather, I was in a country without a single jungle, a country that intersects with the Arctic Circle, in fact, and I was seated in a hexagonal box. More precisely, I was sitting in a roomy Nordic spruce sauna in Heinola, Finland—a dull industrial town some 80 miles northeast of Helsinki—sampling the agony that tomorrow's competitors would experience during the most skin-scorching event on the planet, the Sauna World Championships.

When I entered the sauna, the thermometer read 230 degrees Fahrenheit. (For comparative purposes, the record high temperature in Death Valley is 134.) But when jets of water hit the stove and the air filled with steam, it felt even hotter. For, as everyone knows, it's not the heat but the humidity that destroys you. The sweat-loving Finns had, of course, installed a special 18-kilowatt stove—the Terminator—and this kiuas (Finnish for "stove") was cooking. Where, I wondered, were all those mood-boosting, calm-enhancing negative ions that reputedly dance around in saunas? My mood was wretched, and I was anything but calm.

After two very long minutes, I made a dash for the door, whereupon Kimmo Turunen, a 37-year-old, happy-go-lucky guy from Lahti, Finland, who was training for the SWC, shot me a perplexed look. Later he told me that when I bolted from the sauna, he wasn't even hot.

Obviously he could take the heat. Finns seem to spend much of their lives in saunas, which, thanks to their special stoves, are much steamier than our arid American counterparts. Virtually every home, office building, and prison has one, and Finns believe that steam can cure almost anything, from bodily aches to sexual dysfunction, from depression to a difficult pregnancy. According to a popular proverb, if a sauna and liquor don't help, your condition's fatal.

Some Finns consider the Sauna World Championships just another nutty event, like the Wife-Carrying World Championships or the Anthill Competition or the World Mosquito-Killing Championship their country has hosted over the years. Yet it's not a matter of national pride to squat naked on an anthill longer than anyone else, or to haul your wife the fastest. Sitting in a sauna is, and that's why so many Finns take this event so seriously. Besides, the men's winner gets a week's vacation in sunny Agadir, Morocco—far from the frozen sludge of a Scandinavian winter.

This year, the Australia-based online betting agency Centrebet.com, the only betting outfit in the world that seems to handicap weird sports like futsal (sort of like soccer) and bandy (sort of like ice hockey), has listed Leo Pusa, a 57-year-old, three-time Sauna World Champion from Helsinki, as the odds-on favorite. But Leo has some stiff competition: First he has to fend off last year's champion, a 34-year-old welder from Lahti named Timo Kaukonen. According to Leo, he—not Timo—should have won last year, but the judges pulled him from the sauna prematurely because, they said, he was slipping into unconsciousness. Leo maintains that he was simply lost in thought.

Then there's the upstart Belarusan, a slight, 110-pound 50-year-old named Aleaksandr Katlabai. But he, Kimmo firmly maintains, is no match for the Scandinavians. "A non-Finnish person will never win the Sauna World Championships," he declared. "Of that you can be sure."

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LAWRENCE MILLMAN is the author of 11 books, including the 2002 essay collection Lost in the Arctic (Thunder's Mouth Press).

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