Veikko Huhtanen

Veikko Huhtanen medal table
Apparatus gymnastics
Finland
Olympic games
gold	1948 London	All-around
gold	1948 London	Team ranking
gold	1948 London	Pommel horse
silver	1948 London	Ingots
bronze	1948 London	Horizontal bar
World Championship
silver	1950 Basel	Horizontal bar
silver	1950 Basel	Team ranking

Veikko Aarne Aleks Huhtanen (born June 5, 1919 in Viipuri , † January 29, 1976 in Helsinki ) was a Finnish gymnast who won three Olympic gold medals in 1948.

Life

Huhtanen grew up in Helsinki and started doing gymnastics at the age of 12. In 1938 he made his debut in the international match against Germany in the Finnish national team. The outbreak of World War II led to the cancellation of the 1940 Olympic Games in Helsinki , for which Huhtanen had prepared.

After the Second World War, Huhtanen started gymnastics again. At the Olympic Games in London in 1948 , the Germans and the Japanese had not yet been re-admitted, nor did the Soviet Union team yet. Artistic gymnasts from Finland and Switzerland fought for victory in apparatus gymnastics. In the team standings, the Finns won by 1.6 points. In the individual ranking of the all-around event, Huhtanen won with 0.7 points ahead of the Swiss Walter Lehmann . In the individual devices, Huhtanen was 34th on the ground, eleventh on the rings and sixth in the horse jump. He won a medal on each of the other three machines: bronze on the horizontal bar, silver on the parallel bars and gold on the pommel horse. Strangely enough, three Finnish gymnasts had achieved 38.70 points on the pommel horse, a jump-off was not planned. So were Paavo Aaltonen , Huhtanen and the 40-year-old gymnastics veteran Heikki Savolainen each a gold medal.

At the World Gymnastics Championships in Basel in 1950 , the Swiss gymnasts dominated the Finns. Huhtanen and his team won silver behind the Swiss. On the horizontal bar he won silver behind Paavo Aaltonen. Because of a shoulder injury Huhtanen then had to end his career and missed participation in the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki .

literature

• Erich Kamper , Bill Mallon : Who's Who of the Olympic Games 1896–1992. Who's Who at the Olympics. AGON Sportverlag, Kassel 1992, ISBN 3-928562-47-9 .
• Volker Kluge : Summer Olympic Games. The Chronicle II. London 1948 - Tokyo 1964. Sportverlag Berlin, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-328-00740-7 .

Web links

• Veikko Huhtanen in the database of Sports-Reference (English; archived from the original )