Joining Development Team DSM midway through the 2022 campaign, Axel made the step-up after a solid junior campaign which saw him take promising results in the classics and the Finnish junior road race title.
His dad used to race as an amateur so Axel found himself getting into the sport through him, initially enjoying the thrill and competition of racing. An active kid, he tried lots of different sports such as football, ice hockey and athletics to name a few, but saw he had some talent for cycling and slowly began to drop the other sports – eventually doing ice hockey in the winter and cycling in the summer. At the age of 16 he moved to Sweden to a sports school and from there he has only done cycling as his main sport.
“I’ve always liked cycling; it has a nice mix of being both an individual and team sport. You need to put the work in yourself in training but then you need to come together as a team for the races.”
Stereotypically Finnish, Axel presents himself as quiet and pragmatic, but he comes out of his shell and is more outgoing the longer he knows someone. With that nature, it is no surprise that he describes himself as “sociable”, “determined” and “chilled”, stating that he is able to get on with almost everyone and can form connections with lots of different people. As for the racing, once he has a goal then he will give his all for it, but he also has a switch that he can flip so that he “doesn’t think about cycling all the time” as it something he thinks can be detrimental as in the words of Eminem “you lose yourself”.