Jukka Härkönen feared customs checks when he carried a stack of dollars into Finland

Jukka Härkönen’s memoir opens with the kind of story that captures how improvised sports management could be in the early 1990s. Returning from Paris to Helsinki-Vantaa in the summer of 1991, he carried more than $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills in his hand luggage and worried about a customs inspection.

“Stress was caused by my hand luggage,” Härkönen recalls in the book. He feared customs officials would not believe his explanation: “Would customs believe my explanation that I was taking to the bank money earned by one of the world’s fastest men by running, of which ten percent belonged to me because I was his manager?”

“

Stress was caused by my hand luggage.

No one stopped him at customs. He later deposited the bundle at a Merita bank branch in Lahti.

The memoir, titled Kilsoja, kunniaa ja kyyneleitä, or Miles, Honor and Tears, covers Härkönen’s life from childhood in the remote forests of Sotkamo to international athletics. Now 73, he competed nationally in the triple jump, with a best of 15.38 meters, and studied sports science in Jyväskylä.

“

Would customs believe my explanation that I was taking to the bank money earned by one of the world’s fastest men by running, of which ten percent belonged to me because I was his manager?

After working as a physical education teacher in Lahti in the late 1970s, Härkönen began coaching local athletes. In the following decade, he recruited competitors for Lahti Ahkera’s international athletics meetings. That work introduced him to foreign athletes seeking someone they could trust with their affairs.

“

I needed someone beside me whom I could trust. I told Jukka that I had a good feeling about him in Lahti.

One of them was Frank “Frankie” Fredericks, a Namibian sprinter who had studied at Brigham Young University. When Fredericks asked Härkönen to become his manager, the Finn began a new career. Fredericks later won Olympic silver in both sprint events at Barcelona in 1992 and Atlanta in 1996, as well as the 200-meter world title in Stuttgart in 1993.

Fredericks said he chose Härkönen because he trusted him and because Härkönen understood what mattered to him. Namibia had just become independent, he said, and he had a mission “to run my nation onto the world map.”

“

Namibia had just become independent, and I had a mission to run my nation onto the world map.