I used to hate doing the javelin at school. I’m not sure what it was about the throwing event but there was something I didn’t like. I couldn’t grasp the technique, it always felt awkward and a strain on my limbs. I remember hearing about six months of Steve Backley’s training leading up to a world championships. His shoulder was so badly injured he couldn’t actually throw a javelin, he had to use mental imagery to train instead. That didn’t sound like much fun to me, although maybe preferable to throwing the damn spear.

Biomechanically it is a horrible event, and if you can’t get it right, you end up feeling rather frustrated. It doesn’t matter how strong you are, the javelin doesn’t react to raw strength, it reacts to angle, momentum and well-timed power. Which was just too much physics for my liking. So who does like the javelin? Well, having watched the men’s final in which Norway’s Andreas Thorkildsen set a new Olympic record of 90.57m, it turns out that Scandinavians love the javelin. A Latvian came second then Finland covered third, fourth and fifth.

So I did some investigating and came across a wonderful article in the archives. Check it out and learn why Scandinavians love the event that I couldn’t stand. Here’s a few quotes I enjoyed:

‘The javelin throw - perhaps the most limb-taxing event of the athletics programme - obviously has something that Finns love.’

‘According to 1964 Olympic Champion Pauli Nevala's amusing definition, 'what a great javelin thrower needs is a combination of egocentrism, guts bordering stupidity, plus lots of ambition and limitless greed to succeed - all of which happen to be scorned by our society!' More seriously, you must know how to train, how to prepare for a meeting, and how to execute the intricate movement that, as Matti Jarvinen once wrote 'takes absolutely all the power available in your body, even if for a flash of the moment only.’

Read the the complete article about javelin training here