The Finnish victory in the Eurovision dance contest didn�t set the Finnish press on fire like Lordi�s victory last year. The news was heavily shadowed by a javelin gold medal in Osaka�s world athletics championships and the fact the evening papers didn�t come out on Sunday. The biggest newspaper in country, Helsingin Sanomat managed to ignore it totally! On Monday both evening papers feature a couple of pages to the contest while the other ones mainly published only the news agency�s short piece of news on Sunday.

YLE’s delegation is of course thrilled but with mixed feelings about the missed opportunity to host next year’s contest. “Every time I comment we seem to win” laughs Jaana Pelkonen, the Eurovision Song Contest 2007 hostess, who was commenting the show for the finnish television audience. “First Lordi in Athens and now this!”

“We feel so happy now. We didn’t have much time to prepare ourselves so we focused only on dancing and the victory is a nice bonus” says Jussi Väänänen. “I feel serene, happy and satisfied” adds Katja Koukkula and answers to the question Did you believe you would win? with a simply “Yes”. The Swedish couple came to celebrate with the finnish couplewith a bottle of champagne, writes Iltalehti.

The couple were invited by YLE in June to take part and they started looking for a suitable song and picked up Metallica’s song Unforgiven performed by Apocalyptica. “We danced to this song already ten years ago. We are not big on heavy metal music but this song is great and to me it sounds almost classic music in this version” says Jussi. “We dedicate this victory to our teacher who passed away. We hoped to bring on stage something that would touch the people. Lordi’s victory happened because it was the right thing in the right place and time, and I feel we were in the right place and time, too”.

Generally the Finnish press seems to focus on the fact it was the victory of dance instead of circus numbers. Real professionals won over many Dancing with the stars amateurs, and that Finns set the standard for years to come hoping there will be more professional dancers next year. Before the contest many thought the Finnish couple was too dark, serious and professional to win over the televoting masses but it happened against all odds. A little like Marija Serifovic winning in Helsinki this spring. YLE broadcasted the show on late Sunday evening again. On Saturday night there were some sound problems with the commentators on TV.