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The World Sauna Championships were held every August from 1999 to 2010 in Heinola, a lake town about 90 minutes north-east of Helsinki by car. They ended in the final on 7 August 2010, when one finalist died and the other was critically burned, and there has been no championship since. If you came here to find the next one, there isn't one.
What follows is what the contest actually was, what happened in 2010 and what the investigation found, as reported at the time by Yle, MTV, Kaleva and the Associated Press. One of the two finalists died and the other was left with lasting injuries, so this page keeps to what those reports said.
How the contest worked
The idea was simple and the rules were strict. Competitors sat in a sauna that started at 110 °C (230 °F), and half a litre of water went onto the stones every 30 seconds, so the steam kept getting hotter. The last person who could still sit on the bench, and then walk out unaided, won. According to Kaleva's report from the 2010 event, competitors had to give the judges a thumbs-up to show they were all right.
The rules were about posture and fairness as much as heat. The BBC's 2003 report describes them: sit upright, elbows on knees, buttocks and thighs on the bench. Competitors wore ordinary swimsuits, which is itself the opposite of how most Finns take a sauna, and had to bring a doctor's statement. The saunas were glass-fronted boxes on the stage of Heinola's summer theatre, so the audience could watch faces.
The first year was gentler than what it became. In 1999 the BBC counted eight women and 52 men, with the temperature pushed "towards 100 °C", and the winners lasted 13 minutes 10 seconds and 20 minutes 22 seconds. By 2003 the contest drew people from 15 countries and started at 110 °C. By 2010, when Yle counted 130 competitors from 15 countries, a final lasting three to five minutes was normal.
Heinola was proud of it. The town also ran karaoke and doughnut-eating contests, and the sauna championship belonged to the same family as the wife carrying in Sonkajärvi and the rest of Finland's odd championships: a summer contest that got a small town into the foreign papers.
The champions
The men's title went to a Finn every year. Leo Pusa won three of the first four. Timo Kaukonen, from Lahti, took his first title in 2003 with 16 minutes 15 seconds, beating Pusa, and by 2010 MTV described him as a five-time world champion competing for the tenth time.
The women's side was more international. Natallia Tryfanava of Belarus beat the Finnish former winner Annikki Peltonen in 2003 by lasting exactly 13 minutes.
Criticism long before 2010
The people who care most about Finnish sauna never liked the contest. In August 2009 the chairman of the Finnish Sauna Society, Lasse Lehtonen, told Kansan Uutiset that he did not see much sense in it, that the Society had nothing to do with it, and that it regarded competitive sauna as foreign to sauna culture. His test was simple: sauna that does not feel pleasant is not good sauna. He also warned about burns.
That is the mainstream view, not a fringe one. Finland's own promotion site, thisisFINLAND, calls competing to see who can stand the most heat silly and unhealthy. After 2010, Pekka Tommila of the Society's research committee put it more bluntly: competitions of any kind have very little to do with real sauna bathing.
The final on 7 August 2010
The 2010 championships ran from 5 to 7 August. The men's final on Saturday evening was watched by nearly 1,000 people. Two finalists stayed in longer than finals in earlier years had lasted: Timo Kaukonen, the reigning champion, and Vladimir Ladyzhensky, from Novosibirsk in Russia, born in 1948, who had competed in Heinola the year before. Before the final, Kaukonen told reporters his eyelids were red and his fingers blistered after two rounds, and that he was going in again anyway.
After about six minutes the judges, watching through the window, stopped the final. Both men collapsed as they were brought out. Rescuers tried to revive Ladyzhensky, but he died. Kaukonen was taken to hospital in Helsinki with burns over more than 70 percent of his body, and damage to his airways and kidneys. He spent six weeks in an induced coma at Töölö hospital and more than four months recovering there.
The men's title for 2010 went to Ilkka Pöyhiä, who had walked out of the final on his own feet, as the rules required.
What the investigation found
The police investigated the final for death by negligence, injury by negligence and an offence under the Assembly Act. Two findings matter.
First, the city of Heinola, which organised the event, found in its own review that neither finalist had handed in the medical certificate the rules required. They had agreed to supply them, and the competition director let them compete.
Second, the post-mortem. When the district prosecutor, Erkki Karvinen, announced in March 2011 that nobody would be charged, he said the Russian competitor had taken a conscious risk by using an ointment and painkillers against the rules. The missing certificate, he found, had no causal link to the death. MTV's report of the decision adds that the prosecutor considered the competition director guilty of an assembly offence, because of unclear points in how the final was stopped, but judged a trial unreasonable. The family kept the right to bring a case of their own.
Kaukonen was tested too, and had used nothing. In an interview with MTV in 2016 he said he did not blame the organisers, because he had wanted to sit there himself. He had gone back to the sauna and trained as a sauna therapist in Lahti.
Why it never came back
The competition director, Ossi Arvela, said after the final that it would never be held again, and Heinola's city manager said the town would stop. It did.
Vesa Keskinen, the Tuuri village shopkeeper, announced within days that he would hold the championships in Tuuri the following summer. By May 2011 Yle was describing a much smaller event, the sixth Saimaan Löylycup in South Karelia, as possibly the only sauna competition in Finland that summer. Its water went on the stones about once a minute. In December 2011 Pöyhiä won an unofficial "world championship" in Germany. In 2022 a regional Centre Party youth organisation called for the championships to be restarted in Oulu. They have not been held again.
Sauna competitions in Finland now
The contests that exist today measure skill, not endurance. In September 2026 Ikaalinen Spa & Resort held Finland's first aufguss championship, in which sauna masters perform a 12- to 15-minute ritual of steam, essential oils, music and towel work, and a panel scores it. The winner, the resort's own sauna master Jura, qualified for the Modern Classic Aufguss world final at Farris Bad in Larvik, Norway, on 1–4 October 2026. The 2027 Finnish contest is announced for early in the year at the same spa, with no date yet.
You can watch. Spectators need a spa ticket plus a sauna-world ticket, listed at €9 on the day or €7 booked ahead, and the resort warns that seats in the rituals are limited. Nobody sits in until they collapse, and the audience is in the sauna too.
Visiting Heinola
There is nothing to see of the championships, and the town's own sauna page does not mention them. Heinola is a small lakeside town on the Kymijoki river, and an easy stop on the way north from Lahti.
- By car: about 90 minutes from Helsinki and 20 minutes from Lahti, by the city's own reckoning.
- By train and bus: there is no station. Trains from Helsinki to Lahti take 51–70 minutes, and Lahden Seudun Liikenne buses run on to Heinola. Only two direct buses a day run from Helsinki on weekdays, so check Matkahuolto before relying on one.
For a sauna, the public one at the Rantakylpylä beach, Maaherrankatu 1 in the centre, opened in May 2022. It takes about 20 people, is heated several times a week all year, and has a jetty into the water in winter too. Heinäsaari campsite, Vierumäki and Kumpeli Spa Hotel also have saunas you can use.
How a real Finnish sauna differs
Everything the championship rewarded is what an ordinary Finnish sauna avoids. The Finnish Sauna Society recommends 80 to 100 °C (176 to 212 °F), not a rising 110. You throw water when the room wants it, and ask the others first. You stay for as long as it is pleasant, then cool off and go back in. You leave when it starts to hurt. No big meal and no alcohol beforehand, and nobody is timing you.
Our Finnish sauna guide covers the etiquette, the swimsuit question and the public saunas worth visiting in Helsinki and Tampere.