Michal Klasa

“My wife’s mother has a sister who emigrated to Switzerland and married a hockey player who had been locked up in the Fifties, he’d worked in the uranium mines for five years; and Mr Kazlepka from counter-intelligence phoned me once and said: ‘But there’s something the matter over in Switzerland.’ ‘What’s in Switzerland?’ Well, you, your wife...’ I said: ‘Look. My mother-in-law has a sister, I’ve never seen her my whole life, we don’t correspond, I don’t know her, what do you want of me?’ So he left me be. If he knew that in 1983, when the the world championships were in Switzerland, I had slept in her house, I guess he wouldn’t have liked it. Pavel Doležel let me go there at the time, things like that happened, but only as long as no one found out.”

“Franta Jurza nominated me for the race around Holland, it’s a very interesting race even today, dangerous; I ended up fourth in prologue. Until then, no foreigner had managed to reach top ten in Holland. When I crossed the finishing line, they automatically extended my time by a minute. Jirka Daler had been measuring it, and luckily he went to them and found out that the knew about my time, but that they’d given me an extra minute because it wasn’t possible for a foreigner to be so fast. Then came the second stage, I reached the first group of twelve, but I had puncture. That got me into the second group, and I reckoned: ‘Well that’s it for me, I can’t win now,’ and I was careless in taking one bend, and I hit a parked car. I broke my left shinbone, bruised my face, and ended up in hospital. I was in hospital in Holland for three weeks, then they took me to Prague, to Střešovice, and a week later to the military hospital in Brno. But the leg wasn’t healing after the operation. Four months passed, and thanks to Franta Jurza I became a patient of Professor Slavík. It slowly started to heal, so that I started cycling freely again after five months, but I broke my leg again on a down pedal. I rode to the hospital in Přerov on my bike, pedalling with one leg, the other held in the air. When I came to the surgery claiming I had refractured my left shinbone, they started laughing, but when they checked it out, they confirmed it. Franta Jurza arranged for another helicopter to Prague, and Professor Slavík performed another surgery on me. Three months later I started cycling, I actually hadn’t raced for a year, I hadn’t ridden a bike for ten months, and then I won the Peace Race qualification in Pardubice.”

“When I was in Montreal at the world championships for the first time, that was in 1974, so shortly after Sixty-Eight, we were visited by an enormous amount of them boys (emigrants). They were doing well, but they were all, or at least ninety-five per cent of them, were frustrated by the fact they were banned from coming back here. They always told us: ‘Perhaps we wouldn’t even return, but the fact that we’re not allowed to is gripping us terribly.’ And it’d grip me too, I wouldn’t be able to endure it.”