npr:
In Helsinki, sports facilities pop up all over the place, sometimes in some pretty odd nooks and crannies. One bomb shelter hosts an archery club, another an underground swimming pool and an ice hockey rink.
Though they hardly need it, there’s a national plan in Finland to get people to sit less. It reminds them, in fact, that “Under the Constitution … physical activity is a basic cultural right.”
“It’s been kind of a social right to provide citizens with sporting possibilities,” says Hanna Vehmas, a sports scientist at the University of Jyväskylä. She says it’s a Nordic thing to consider sports a social right. That thinking started in the 1970s, when governments started subsidizing sports gyms in even the smallest towns.
Now, she says, “there’s an estimate of some close to 30,000 sports facilities in this country, which is said to be more per capita than in any other country in the world.”
Those facilities are one reason why Finland and its Nordic neighbors always make the top five list of most physically active European countries, according to surveys by the European Commission.
How Finns Make Sports Part Of Everyday Life
Photo credit: (top) Sami Uskela/Flickr (bottom) Rae Ellen Bichell for NPR