Koffin Vauhtikisat / Koff Speed Race (2015-)

The summer 2013 up north road trip changed my life as the conversations I had in Rovaniemi with my friend Wu-Tom lead us to open My Favorite Things skate shop in August 2014. (Please check the separate project post about MFT for that story).

On the same visit to Rovaniemi, I remember randomly bumping in to this tattooed guy who didn’t look like he was from Lapland.

Marc-Antoine Marcoux, a skater from Québec City, introduced himself, and after a while of talking this and that with him & Wu-Tom at the local Real Deal skate shop, we went to have a burger and some beers.

Marc-Antoine

Little did I know that night that we’d become such good friends with “Kanadan Markku”.

Markku moved to Helsinki the year after, and when he moved here, I was helping to introduce him to skateboarder friends in Helsinki. After a while he was well connected with pretty much all the homies, the SLP crew particularly.

Markku’s birthday, Suomenlinna, Helsinki. 2014

Puple park in Eira, Helsinki was our hang out spot pretty much every day, and Los Cojones, Bar Llamas and We Got Beef were our bars every weekend. When we weren’t skating, we occasionally went to Sinebrychoff Park a.k.a. Koffari to hang out and drink beers on a sunny day.

Labor Day celebrations in Puple park. 2014

It was around spring 2015 when Markku came up to me with an idea.

He thought the asphalt path going through a S-curve and the steep downhill at Sinebrychoff Park was skateable. He wanted to organize a downhill speed race there.

In Québec City Markku had organized this yearly hill bombing contest which was basically going through the whole city from top to bottom and took almost an hour (and several beers) to finish. He said it was the best event ever and he missed it a lot, so he was wanting to do an event with the same kind of energy in Helsinki too.

I told him that we had thought about organizing something at Koffari few years earlier with Tumppi Vuorensola from Grey Market Supply, but we had gave up with the idea as we thought a contest there would be just too risky. Also the park gets quite crowded on weekends so that was another problem.

Markku was confident about it, he said he had gone from top to bottom once and it was possible. The people would move when the action starts. Ok then, let’s do it.

The budget? Not a problem, no need for it.

All we needed was some speed shades, a couple flame beanies and some word of mouth promotion.

Speed shades from Tokmanni, 5€ a pop

Flame beanies from some random motorcycle accessory shop, customized with MFT patches

First Koffin Vauhtikisat “flyer”, 2015

On top of the agreed flame beanies and speed shades, we needed beer. Not just any beer, we needed Koff.

As the location was Sinebrychoff Park, and the Finland’s largest brewery Sinebrychoff originated from there, we couldn’t make any exceptions. Only Koff for the winner podium. The beers also worked as a physical podium.

1) 3 lavaa - 72 beers

2) 2 lavaa - 48 beers

3) 1 lava - 24 beers

The podium. 2019

Sinebrychoff brewery next to the Sinebrychoff park from 1907. Photographer unknown. Source helsinkikuvia.fi

We didn’t even think of contacting the brewery, we thought they wouldn’t be into the whole thing as everything was kept low key intentionally. We just decided to buy the beers from a local grocery store.

30€ for the speed shades, 30€ for the flame beanies, 200€ for the beer. 260€ total. That was roughly our budget for 2015 and for many years to come.

Here’s the recap from Koffin Vauhtikisat 2015:

After the 2015 race we knew that the event was a game changer.

Even with just posting on social media about the whole thing a day or two earlier, couple hundred people showed up to check out the race.

Also which we noticed straight from the first event was that the whole action was drawing a lot of attention from people passing by. So it looked like we had created something truly special which seemed to be quite interesting for non-skaters as well.

It seemed like the crowd was just growing and growing at the park until the winners had been announced.

Our friend Tuukka Korhonen almost lost his leg though, and spent 31 days in hospital after the event. He didn’t even participate to the race but was just walking in the bottom of the park, when his Happy Hour Skateboards team mate Tommi Björk crashed into him.

This has been the worst accident that has happened at Koff race. There’s been a broken bone or two every year, but luckily nothing more serious.

Tuukka’s interview at Kingpin Mag about the crash

So here’s how the years went by. If we got 200 people for 2015, there was at least 300 for 2016. Then for 2017 it was 400. And we even slowed down with the promotion side as we didn’t want it to go too big.

In 2018 our friend, professional skateboarder Marius Syvänen, was creating a video content series called “Mind of Marius” for Thrasher Magazine’s website. The 2018 Koffin Vauhtikisat recap was sent over to Thrasher and once they uploaded it, it reached 50k views on youtube + the social media posts with over 100k likes.

For 2019 and onwards, our friend Vesa Ritola from El Rio Grind has helped us with amazing promo videos.

In 2019, some of our event clips started to go viral on skateboarding pages on Instagram, and that lead to Pubity (30,5 million followers on Instagram) re-posting some of the content on their page. Too bad we don’t have any screen caps saved, but just the amount of likes was closer to a million.

I mean, to me it doesn’t really matter if we go viral or not, it doesn’t affect the way we do Koffin Vauhtikisat. It doesn’t change our local cultural impact any bit, and we’re here to create culture for Helsinki.

Samu Sundell a.k.a. Koff-Man, the man the myth. Photo by Sam Clark

But I have to say this - it underlines the importance of these cultural events that are based on simple things, which don’t always need a huge budget behind it to mean something to people. If something looks that fun that there’s hundreds of thousands of people commenting on social media that they’d want to join the event too, it means we’re doing something meaningful here in Helsinki. And for the rest of the world, maybe our events inspire other people to do fun stuff in their cities. At least I hope for that.

I dare to say there’s not a skate event in the world which would be internationally this well known and respected, but still has under a 300€ yearly budget.

Still mostly word of mouth, but we get the park filled

The suede vest. Never been washed.

Kusti’s band-aids

There’s big plans around the next Koffin Vauhtikisat 2022, but the budget from the organizing POV stays the same. I hope to see you at the next race this July.

Please follow our official Instagram, there’s a bunch of photos and clips from over the years.

https://www.instagram.com/koffinvauhtikisat/

Thank you Markku for being my friend, you’re an amazing human being.