© Jani Lehtola
In Finland they got something called "sisu". It's not an easy word to explain and google translate really doesn't help ("go"), but it has to do with never surrendering, to never give up no matter how bad the odds look. To me, Jani Lehtola is the incarnation of "sisu".
Jani found his dream project, the Turvasanat assis project on the Martti Servo block, at Rovaniemi in northern Finland. The line is beautiful, the rock quality is amazing and the compression moves are powerful.
One slight problem though. Jani doesn't live in Rovaniemi. In fact he doesn't live anywhere near the place, but in Oulu (or Uleåborg as we call it in Sweden), a more than 200km drive south. Now, if it would have been say... Adam Ondra, this wouldn't have been much of an issue. Then the project would have been done in a session and that would have been it. Make no mistake, Jani IS strong, but he is not Adam Ondra strong.
Most... actually practically everyone would have given up here. Why bother? Plenty of other projects, right?
First of all: Jani is not a quitter.
Second of all: Jani is NOT a quitter!
Third of all: The closest boulder is 60km off anyway.
Said and done. He made the drive back and forth more than 30 times. That's 13 000km in total. And after some 160 hours and 300 tries he had worked the line into submission.
Below is the result (which also serves most excellent as a crash course of Finnish cursing). Voimasanat means "words of power". Coincidence?
Jani has suggested 8B+ which makes it the fourth of the grade in Finland after Living the dream, The Globalist and Circus elephant syndrome, all by Nalle Hukkataival.
Missing video!
Comments