She trained at Espoo Sailing Club (Finnish: Esbo Segelförening) throughout most of her sporting career under her longtime coach and mentor Minna Aalto.[4] As of September 2014, Tenkanen was ranked sixth in the world for the one-person dinghy class by the International Sailing Federation, following her successes at the European and ISAF World Championships.[5][6]
Tenkanen qualified for the Finnish squad in the newly introduced Laser Radial class at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing by placing twelfth and receiving a berth from the ISAF World Championships in Auckland, New Zealand.[7][8] She posted a net score of 128 points to achieve a creditable twenty-second position in a fleet of twenty-eight sailors, edging out Belarus' Tatiana Drozdovskaya by a mere, thirteen-point gap on the tenth leg.[9][10]