At the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Suomalainen qualified for his second Finnish team, as a 30-year-old, in the Laser class by placing fourteenth and obtaining a berth from the 2003 ISAF World Championships in Cadiz, Spain. Unlike his previous Olympics, Suomalainen could not upgrade his feat with a nineteenth-place effort in a fleet of forty-two sailors, recording a net score of 160.