“My first hours in Finland, we went to a sauna.”
The craziest ones
Mike Boisvert spent two weeks in Finland this summer with Gab, Gabriel Proulx, his travel partner from Québec, and calls it his favourite of the three Nordic countries he covered, with a warning attached. “We should not have started with Finland, because it was a bit overkill. It was too strong.” Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania afterwards felt boring by comparison; they wanted to go back. The people in Norway and Sweden had already told him the Finns were the craziest ones about skateboarding, and he found nothing to contradict it. There are so many events that some days there are three in the country at the same time, every one full, and everyone shows up. “They party all night, they skate all day, and they do sauna for a living. Sauna is their religion.” His first hour in the country went as promised: within sixty minutes of arriving, he and Gab were in a sauna. That is also where they met Heini Luotola, who would end up in most of the rest of the trip. The summer is short and the winter is long, with parts of the country going months without sun, so the season is lived all at once. In summer there is no night either; bring an eye mask. “Everybody has an eye mask.”
Helride, the Koff race and a boat
Helride is the biggest contest in Finland, three or four days of mayhem in Helsinki every summer, built on DIY setups rather than a big budget, in the spirit of the Dime Glory Challenge. “It was totally insane.” The last setup of this year's edition sat right in front of the most famous monument in Helsinki. Mike and Gab started the trip there; Gab skated with the pros and got destroyed, in the good sense, and Mike spent three hours winning the fingerboard contest. “I won the fingerboard contest, and I didn't win anything. Not even ten euros.” The full recap is below. The weekend after came the Koff race, a small downhill race that is always in Thrasher and Pocket, organised by a Quebecer, Marcus, who has lived in Finland for about fifteen years and brought the concept over from Québec City. It has become so mainstream that the whole city turns out for a spot that is not that big; this year, Mike thought, too many people. There were Quebecers everywhere, Alex Lacroix and Sam Brown among them. “Everybody was speaking French. I felt like I was in Québec.” In between the two, Red Bull ran an event on a boat. And Beyond, the biggest skate shop in Finland, held a movie premiere. He forgot about that one until the call. “There's too many events, bro.”
Grip, and the park he had to himself at midnight
Grip Skatepark in Tampere is brand new and, by Mike's estimate, part of a building that must have cost twenty million euros, because the skatepark is only one piece of it. It has the biggest vert ramp he has ever seen. “It makes the TAZ look no budget.” The ground-floor street section is rail-heavy and not really his thing, the street section upstairs is better, and they have since built another mini ramp on top. He filmed there for fourteen hours in one day and made two videos out of it; the second one started at midnight, when they brought him back in and gave him the whole park to himself. “I was so dead, bro.” The park is Mike's answer to what Finland has that most countries do not: real money behind skateboarding, government support included, alongside the skate schools and the DIYs. The Grip video is below.
The DIYs, and the fight to keep them
Finland loves DIY, and builds it big. Kenneli DIY, in Tampere, is Mike's number one place to skate in the country: a gigantic outdoor bowl he calls the gnarliest he has ever seen, a vert ramp, a street section and two mini ramps, indoors and out. “One of the coolest DIYs. Me and Gab, we loved it.” It is also under threat, and he does not think it will survive. In Helsinki, Suvilahti DIY is the famous one, the P45 of Finland and probably bigger, harder to skate than P45 and still skated hard whenever there is a contest in it. The city wants to tear it down next month, after ten years of the community fighting for it; the campaign is called Save Suvilahti, and there is graffiti in the bowl that says what the skaters think of Helsinki's decision. Mike's position is short: they have to save it. A new DIY is going up elsewhere in Helsinki, not finished yet. Hermanni Skatepark, free and under a bridge in Helsinki, is the popular outdoor park he ran out of time for.
Skaters to know
Jaakko Ojanen (@jaakkoojanen), from Tampere, is Mike's number one pick and one of his favourite skaters, full stop. Pro for Element since 2025, super tech, quick feet, and always on terrain nobody else would look at. “Everything he does is like magic.” Mike puts him in the same family as Alex Lacroix, his Element teammate. Heini Luotola (@hluotola), from Tampere, is the OG of the group and one of the best skaters in Finland, a bowl ripper who is the subject of Mike's video on the country's DIY culture, above. Eetu Toropainen (@eetutoropainen), from Helsinki, is the street genius Mike has not met but had to include. “There's a lot of good skaters from Finland. I didn't know who to write.” And there is Arto Saari, the biggest legend the country has produced, from the Flip era, a photographer now. Mike would like to meet him one day.
A ranch with two saunas
Havumäki Skate Ranch is a skate resort in the middle of the country, in the middle of nowhere: two saunas, two bowls, an indoor mini ramp, a downhill street section, no neighbours, and the odd snake. Mike, Gab and Heini had the whole place to themselves for two free nights, and left only because paying guests were arriving and the place had to be cleaned. He would have stayed a week. It is for sale, at 246,000 euros, which he thinks is cheap for what it is, if you can live with the remoteness. The park is decent rather than his favourite, and he took notes for the resort he wants to build one day. The ranch video is below.
If you go
Go in summer, when the country compresses a year of skateboarding into a few weeks, and plan around Helride. Sompasauna in Helsinki is the sauna to start with, because it is the culture. Repovesi National Park is where to go to reconnect with nature. Tampere has Grip and Kenneli and is worth the trip on its own. One logistical note from Mike for anyone thinking about the region as a whole: Finland is a little disconnected from the rest of the North, a twelve-hour ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm, so fly. His closing pitch for the three countries together, which he made on the call, was a full-on JACKALOPE festival somewhere in the North.
Mike Boisvert: “You want to feel like an adventurer, an explorer, you go to Finland.”
Photos and video: Mike Boisvert / The Skate Nomad. Part of the JACKALOPE Skate Atlas, one country at a time, with the skaters who live there. See every country on the map.
