How will the Finns get revenge this  time?

 France and Finland have endured something of a frosty relationship. This probably stems from the time in 2005 when France's then president, Jacques Chirac, declared that Britain had the worst food in Europe--after Finland. It provoked something of an international incident--well, in Finland at least.

Here in Britain, we are resigned to terrible cuisine, yet the cultural norm is to never complain about anything. What else would you expect from a land that offers haggis as a national delicacy? That's a sheep's stomach stuffed with barley and offal, in case you're tempted.

Hostilities resumed big time between the French and the Finns last week, in Paris and Wales. Over in France, home-grown hero Jean Todt defeated Finland's Ari Vatanen for the FIA presidency. Meanwhile, in the Welsh capital of Cardiff, France's Sébastien Loeb took on Finland's Mikko Hirvonen for the FIA World Rally Championship title.

In both cases, France came out on top--serving only to reinforce every Frenchman's general notion that they are superior at everything to the rest of the world. But the Finns are determined to fight back, as the Finns have sisu. This largely untranslatable word roughly means “sustained courage and determination in the face of adversity.” Perhaps it is the same unhinged impulse that drives the Finns to roll around in the snow after broiling themselves in the sauna. Or to think that tractor pulling (in which tractors pull assorted loads across a field) makes a viable spectator sport.

As the Finns found out the hard way throughout history, given that their country borders Russia, an attack is the best form of defense. Vatanen wasted no time in informing people of his belief that the crucial FIA presidential election was somehow rigged.

“I thought that more people would vote for me, but apparently the delegates felt the pressure,” he said, with no hint of sour grapes. “It's very hard to renew this regime. I hope that the FIA will become more democratic but so far, it is just wishful thinking.”

In other words, to borrow from the French, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Which brings us back to Sébastien Loeb, who racked up World Rally Championship title No. 6 last weekend. That's a decent enough consolation prize for being slowest in a recent GP2 Series test and subsequently not being awarded an FIA superlicence, which put an end to his dream of racing for Scuderia Toro Rosso in Formula One's Abu Dhabi season finale.

When Loeb keeps on winning championships with such monotonous regularity, it is hard for us journalists to find a new angle on the story. So we've been knocking around a few ideas for fresh headlines. How about: “Lousy GP2 driver wins World Rally Championship,” or “Title No. 6 for man with no superlicence”?

The French may have comprehensively won the week, but the Finns must be plotting something, since they always like to have the last laugh. For example, going back to the hot potato (pardon the pun) of Finland's gastronomy, a Finnish pizza chain managed to exact perfect revenge last year for Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi's assertion that Finns are so ignorant of world cuisine “they don't even know what Parma ham is.”

In response, Kotipizza won the 2008 America's Plate International Pizza Contest, naming its award-winning pizza the Berlusconi. This was because Berlusconi (clearly a buddy of Chirac) had bizarrely claimed that Finns only eat smoked reindeer, which is, in fact, a specialty of north Norway and Russia.

The acclaimed Berlusconi pizza's secret ingredient was, of course, smoked reindeer.