"VAN" (Sports Desk - 11.05.2026) :: Riikka Pakarinen, President of the Finnish Athletics Federation, brought fresh greetings to the spring seminar of the Finnish Sports Journalists’ Association from Lausanne, where she had met the President of European Athletics, Bulgaria’s Dobromir Karamarinov.
“Finland’s bid to bring the 2030 European Athletics Championships to Helsinki and the renovated Olympic Stadium is progressing very well,” Pakarinen told the seminar audience of nearly one hundred participants.
“When we were still at the beginning of the bidding process, we were challengers to Zurich and Brussels. Now we have caught up with them, at the very least,” Pakarinen said.
Pakarinen was able to inform the President and the executive leadership of European Athletics that the Finnish government had, just the previous week, granted €10 million in support for the bid process. This already covers one third of the event’s budget.
“We are building a Finnish model around the championships, in which we aim to ensure in advance that no single party will be solely responsible for the costs. The championships are estimated to generate approximately €100,000 in revenue for the Helsinki region, and through TV visibility they would also bring enormous attention to Helsinki and Finland, if we are awarded the event,” Pakarinen said.
Pakarinen was the main guest at the spring seminar of the Finnish Sports Journalists’ Association. A new feature this year was that the seminar could be followed via live stream across Finland, which increased the number of participants to nearly one hundred.
“We tried a new approach because Finland is a long country, and in Inari people are still skiing on natural snow. The experiment was worthwhile, as we were able to make an interesting event accessible to everyone. A recording of the event can also be watched afterwards on our YouTube channel,” said Jari Porttila, President of the association.
The seminar focused on self-employment and the many issues that must be taken into account when establishing one’s own company. Sandra Hellsten and Hanna Kauppi from Finago presented different options for setting up a company, while Katja Kuntola from the accounting firm Mertaoja explained the various obligations that entrepreneurs must meet.
Today, the majority of journalists are forced to establish their own companies, as media houses rarely hire permanent sports journalists anymore. Instead, they buy stories from companies. In practice, anyone who wants to sell their articles and photos is almost required to set up their own business.
“The media world is becoming more and more fragmented. We must respond to the challenges this brings, and judging by the number of participants, it seems that journalists are precisely in need of this kind of advice,” Porttila summarized.
Kaj Kunnas, who worked as a sports journalist at YLE for nearly 30 years and has covered a total of 17 Olympic Games, compared his career as a “salary soldier” at YLE with life as a self-employed entrepreneur. According to Kunnas, one of the good things about YLE was that the salary always arrived on a certain day; as a self-employed entrepreneur, the time between paydays can vary.
“Today, you have to work extremely hard for your income, but it is also rewarding. As a self-employed entrepreneur, you can make the decisions yourself; as an employee, someone else always makes them for you,” Kunnas said.
“Without YLE, however, I would not be here speaking today. When nearly two million viewers follow its sports events, the journalist also gains considerable visibility and recognition,” Kunnas said, thanking his former employer.
Cr-AIPS
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