Thanks to Esa Ranki, I was lucky to witness the decisive game four where Riihimäki’s Cocks beat down Kauniainen’s HC West in the Finnish handball league. Cocks took the championship for a third time in a row. The first victory came in 2007.
What we saw were two very different teams. HC West looked like a well-behaving team of innocent-looking swedish-talking student boys. Cocks looked like a noisy gang of guilty-looking finnish & other eastern-european dialects talking tattooed bodies most of whom work as guards in the Riihimäki county jail. You could see and feel the difference.
There was in the 1990s a lone graffiti welcoming new guests in the Riihimäki railway station. It said: “Welcome to Riihimäki, the ugliest town in eastern europe.” For some reason, that graffiti stayed there for several years.
Over the period break I met Jani Peltonen, my old running rival from the Riihimäki years. We once clocked in exactly the same time 4.39-something in a school meet’s 1500m when we were like 15. Not even the cameraman was able to tell a difference. Now that was competitive running…