WHO are the greatest Finnish sports stars of all time? The man being asked frowns, grins and looks away. He feels uneasy because he is wrapped up in the answer. This is Lasse Viren, he of four Olympic gold medals. “Paavo Nurmi is top,” is his final answer.

“And then?” “This is not easy,” he replies. He pauses. “OK. Matti is there next.” No surname required for Matti Nykänen. Finns have long had two loves: athletics and ski jumping. Nurmi was their greatest athlete. “Matti,” Viren says, “is the best ski jumper of all time.”

Viren, by common consent, is up there too, only he won’t say so. That isn’t his style. He is charming, intelligent and too political. Viren today runs his own charity to help young people in sport and is a member of parliament; Nykänen today is on trial for aggravated assault.

The two knife wounds in the back of a 59-year-old “friend” represented such damning evidence that the question before the court in Tampere, an industrial town two hours north of Helsinki, was not whether he was guilty — Nykänen admitted the offence — but how many years he would serve in prison.

His trial lasted only one day, camera crews waiting in the grey, cold morning to record his arrival, the town’s quiet courts transformed, suddenly staging a national event so widely watched that initial notices were given in English as well as Finnish to accommodate the foreign media.

Nykänen, 41, does not recall anything of the incident or even the knife, which is not altogether surprising given that it provided the climax to one of his infamous drinking sessions at his summer-house in Nokia, a village near Tampere, that lasted so many days that no one knows its exact duration. His wife Mervi, his regular drinking partner, was present, as well as Aarvo Hujanen, who would become his victim.

It was mid-afternoon and they had been watching the Olympics when a game was suggested: sormikoukku, the Finnish equivalent of arm-wrestling, where you link index fingers and the game is to pull your opponent towards you. Nykänen was twice beaten by the older man. He then flew into a sudden rage. That was all it took.

The reaction in Finland has been of overwhelming sadness. More telling is the absence of any surprise.

MATTI PULLI first saw Nykänen jump in 1978, when he was 14. Pulli was 45, so he had seen a lot in his time as a coach, but that is a day he hasn’t forgotten. Nykänen was regularly skipping school to go to the hill in Jyväskylä in central Finland. Pulli could see why. “He jumped four or five times,” Pulli said. “He was perfectly built for a ski jumper. He had already learnt the technique. I said right there that he would be Finland’s next world champion.”

Pulli immediately became Nykänen’s coach. Nykänen, in his youth, approached his sport with an astonishing work ethic and Pulli, in return, was able to reward him with the new theories of aerodynamics that he had been studying. The result was “The Jumping Eagle” and, after four years, Pulli’s prophecy was fulfilled: 1982, Nykänen’s first year as a senior, the World Championships in Oslo, a foggy morning. One for playing safe, one when the young Finn was alone in launching himself into the gloom apparently unhindered by fear.

Over the next eight years, Nykänen would win four Olympic golds and another 14 at World Championships, a record unmatched by any other jumper. The medals are on show in the Helsinki Museum of Sport, which purchased the entire collection when Nykänen put each of them up for sale in order to finance his drinking.

It did not help Nykänen that his was a sport that took courage and machismo to extremes and where drinking was part of the culture. “It’s not that way any more,” Pulli said. “But in those days it was more dangerous — the equipment was so poor, there were more falls. The character of those jumpers was a little different.”

Had he jumped a decade and a half later, Nykänen would have been a euro millionaire. Back then, rewards were limited, the concept of a manager did not exist and those managers whom Nykänen has had since retirement have helped themselves more than they have helped him. So among Nykänen’s income sources, after he quit in 1991, was his work as a stripper in a casino outside Helsinki. His preferred employment was as a nightclub singer; nobody bought his records but, because of the fascination in him, he could guarantee a crowd. His money, though, tended to come from that other sport in which he is unrivalled — tabloid news.