| 1961 Nordic Athletics Championships | |
|---|---|
| Host city | Oslo, Norway |
| Level | Senior |
| Type | Outdoor |
1963 → | |
The 1961 Nordic Athletics Championships was the inaugural edition of the international athletics competition between Nordic countries and was held in Oslo, Norway. It consisted of 34 individual athletics events, 22 for men and 12 for women. This covered a track and field programme plus a men's marathon race.
The Nordic Athletics Championships was an international athletics competition between Nordic countries – Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland. It was held on three occasions, in 1961, 1963 and 1965.
Athletics is a collection of sporting events that involve competitive running, jumping, throwing, and walking. The most common types of athletics competitions are track and field, road running, cross country running, and race walking.
The Nordic countries or the Nordics are a geographical and cultural region in Northern Europe and the North Atlantic, where they are most commonly known as Norden. The term includes Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as Greenland and the Faroe Islands—which are both part of the Kingdom of Denmark—and the Åland Islands and Svalbard and Jan Mayen archipelagos that belong to Finland and Norway respectively, whereas the Norwegian Antarctic territories are often not considered a part of the Nordic countries, due to their geographical location. Scandinavians, who comprise over three quarters of the region's population, are the largest group, followed by Finns, who comprise the majority in Finland; other groups are indigenous minorities such as the Greenlandic Inuit and the Sami people, and recent immigrants and their descendants. The native languages Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese are all North Germanic languages rooted in Old Norse. Native non-Germanic languages are Finnish, Greenlandic and several Sami languages. The main religion is Lutheran Christianity. The Nordic countries have much in common in their way of life, history, religion, their use of Scandinavian languages and social structure. The Nordic countries have a long history of political unions and other close relations, but do not form a separate entity today. The Scandinavist movement sought to unite Denmark, Norway and Sweden into one country in the 19th century, with the indepedence of Finland in the early 20th century, and Iceland in the mid 20th century, this movement expanded into the modern organised Nordic cooperation which includes the Nordic Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers. Especially in English, Scandinavia is sometimes used as a synonym for the Nordic countries, but that term more properly refers to the three monarchies of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Geologically, the Scandinavian Peninsula comprises the mainland of Norway and Sweden as well as the northernmost part of Finland.
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Finland topped the men's points classification with 190.5 points, while Sweden won the first women's team title with 89 points. Iceland took part in the men's competition only and was the only nation not to have an athlete top the podium. Among the athletes in attendance were 1956 Olympic medalists Vilhjálmur Einarsson and Jorma Valkama and 1960 Olympic medalist Eeles Landström. [1]
At the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, 33 athletics events were contested, 24 for men and 9 for women. There were a total number of 720 participating athletes from 61 countries.
Vilhjálmur Einarsson is an Icelandic former athlete, and triple-jump silver medalist at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. Vilhjálmur grew up in the East-Icelandic fishing village of Reyðarfjörður and is the son of Einar Stefánsson and Sigríður Vilhjálmsdóttir.
Jorma Rainer Valkama was a Finnish athlete who competed mainly in the long jump.
Nina Hansen was the most successful athlete of the tournament, taking the women's titles in 80 metres hurdles, long jump and women's pentathlon for Denmark. Carl Fredrik Bunæs and Ulla-Britt Wieslander won 100 metres/200 metres sprint doubles in the men's and women's sections, respectively. Dan Waern of Sweden had a middle-distance track double and Finland's Reijo Höykinpuro similarly completed a long-distance track double.
Nina Hansen is a Danish athlete. She competed in the women's long jump at the 1964 Summer Olympics.
80 metres hurdles is a distance in hurdling ran by women until 1972 in international competitions.
The long jump is a track and field event in which athletes combine speed, strength and agility in an attempt to leap as far as possible from a take off point. Along with the triple jump, the two events that measure jumping for distance as a group are referred to as the "horizontal jumps". This event has a history in the Ancient Olympic Games and has been a modern Olympic event for men since the first Olympics in 1896 and for women since 1948.
