This Legend Won 5 Olympic Golds With a Stopwatch in Hand—and Changed Pacing Forever
“The only good pace is a suicide pace, and today looks like a good day to die.” — Steve Prefontaine
“When you race against time, you don’t have to sprint. Others can’t hold the pace if it is steady and hard all through to the tape.” — Paavo Nurmi
Every generation of runners arrives at its own answer to the question of how much a person should think while suffering. Steve Prefontaine, perhaps the most mythologized figure in the sporting canon, responded by refusing to slow down, never mind that the suicide-pace quote attributed to him is of questionable origin. Paavo Nurmi's conclusion, decades earlier and far less romantic, was to focus on almost nothing else, and to carry a stopwatch through races that everyone else ran by feel, as proof of it.
The beloved Finnish icon, who redefined running in the 1920s behind the revolutionary notion that even splits produce the best times, remains one of track and field’s most decorated Olympians with 12 medals to his name, nine of them gold. What set Nurmi apart was a method that wouldn't become common practice until long after he retired. The stopwatch shaped Nurmi’s training, which leaned on what we'd now call interval workouts, though nobody had a name for it yet (his regimen, as the story goes, also included racing a mail train through the streets of his hometown, Turku), and it stayed in his hand during races themselves, a way of holding his own pace honest when instinct might have pulled him off it.
"From the very first Nurmi set out to match his strides against time, and in the process he has evolved those terrible time schedules which have broken the heart of every man who has run against him," The Guardian wrote in 1930, marveling at “his theory that a mile race should be run all in one piece,” rather than the conventional approach of the era, which called for starting fast, easing through the middle laps, and saving something for the sprint at the end.
The French newspaper Le Petit Parisien, watching Nurmi work through the 1924 Paris Olympics, found him no less remarkable: "The cogwheels in his stopwatch are like his legs,” they wrote, “like his heart and lungs, tireless, unbreakable."
Nicknamed the “Flying Finn,” Nurmi broke 20 world records across a variety of distances and never once lost a 10,000-meter race in a 14-year career. Even so, the 1924 Games belong in a category of their own. In Paris that summer, Nurmi became the first person—and remains the only one—to win five individual gold medals in athletics at a single Olympics.
What makes the 1924 Games so exceptional isn’t just the five golds, but how two of them happened. In the 1500 meters, Nurmi shattered the Olympic record with his trusty timepiece as his guide, as his closest competitor, an American named Ray Watson, faded before the final lap. But Nurmi’s work wasn’t done yet. After the race, he walked straight off the track to the locker room, where he reportedly fell asleep on a massage table while someone attended to his legs.
When Nurmi returned to the competition field at Stade Colombes for the 5,000 meters, the plot against him was already underway. His rivals, the Finn Ville Ritola and the Swede Edvin Wide, sensed weakness, assuming Nurmi must be exhausted from the earlier race. The two set out to break him by pushing the pace toward a world record to open the event.
What came next from Nurmi felt almost scripted. Halfway through the event, he threw his stopwatch onto the grass, having realized there was no longer any use for it. In a rare change of circumstances, Nurmi wasn't just racing his clock anymore. Instead, he was actually dueling with his competition.
Wide faded first, and the two Finns ran on together until Ritola made his move on the home straight. Nurmi answered by finding one more gear, beating him to the line by a single meter and setting yet another Olympic record in the process, just 52 minutes after the conclusion of the 1500.
Yet the stopwatch in question wasn’t just any metronome. Heading into the Games, Nurmi had planned to carry a gold watch he'd won as a prize—the same one he meant to discard at the bell lap for that final burst of speed. Only later did it occur to him that flinging something so valuable into the infield grass might not be his best idea.
Luckily for Nurmi, his friend, Tahko Pihkala, credited with inventing the Finnish version of baseball, offered a solution: a sturdier, steel-cased watch of his own, borrowed in turn from his wife, which Nurmi carried through his three individual races before handing it back to Pihkala once the medals were secured.
Pihkala, delighted by what his watch had witnessed, had it engraved to mark the occasion. A quiet footnote to history, it reads: “This watch was held by P. Nurmi when running 1500, 5000 and 3000 m at the Olympic Games 1924.”
In the end, it was the laps Nurmi ran on feel alone that decided the race.
Jeff Kirshman is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Chicago. His work has appeared in Runner's World, ESPN, The Classical, and the Casper Star-Tribune, and has been featured in the "Best American Sports Writing" anthology series. Outside of work, he's an avid runner and adventure traveler who has completed 10 marathons, including three Boston qualifiers, won the Great Wall of China Marathon, and summited Mount Kilimanjaro, though he'd trade it all for a reliable jump shot and the ability to parallel park on the first try.