Tomáš Kučera

"I was wearing short skis, they didn't make longer ones back then. The skis had a different centre of gravity, they went, as we used to say, under the luft, they couldn't be pulled out. It ended up with a blow on the stomach or on the shoulder. I could break three or four skis in one winter. There were two falls in a training session. On the other hand, you didn't notice the first fall at the beginning of the winter, you weren't too sure. After that, you had to watch everything. I already knew how to cover my head, where one ski was going, the other ski. I have an experience, we went ski jumping alone without a coach, Mr. Lehnemayer couldn't. When we were sixteen, three of us went to Zakopane by ourselves to the big hill, there was no big hill in our country then. We went to the Big Kroke to jump. We wanted a good length. It started to snow a lot, we didn't have goggles, or just the horrible ones you use for grinding. Plastic ones. I went to the associates, to Peter Bajer, he was the youngest of the guys. They were out of races and I went to ask him if he'd lend me some glasses. They knew how I jumped, how I was. Bajer says to me, 'I'm not gonna let you borrow them, I've got one. You'll bounce again soon, fall on your mouth and break my glass.' So I shut up. So I have to go to someone else. I dared to go to Stefan Oleksak, he was ten years older. And Stefan lent me his glasses and it ended exactly as Bajer said. I fell and rolled. We were without helmets, of course. One of the skis came out, made a few turns and hit me in the head with the tip. It was my first race on TV, my jumps. My mom watched and then never watched again."

"I have a former cross-country skier too, we met at Vosecká bouda. But she skied only until she was a junior. Then she was supposed to go to Zdeněk Ciller in Jablonec, but we agreed that she would ski only for fun, not as a top skier." "I probably wouldn't let her go to Zdeněk either." "Not to mention that there wasn't just drills and stuff. There were also all kinds of illegal means, so it was... we always said, 'No doping because we want to have healthy kids.' Before the Olympics in Sapporo, I was also offered prohibited means. Of course I refused, even though I knew that almost all the top guys were taking different drugs. " "What was it then? Some pills?" "It was evolving. When I was at the Olympics in Grenoble, they only tested for ephedrine and similar banned substances. They didn't test for anabolics yet, not even in Sapporo. I know that clearly, for example, the GDR athletes went to Strbské pleso. It was at altitude, and there it got to the point where they made blood preserves and injected themselves with all sorts of things. A doctor went with them and a nurse went with them. I know this also because a friend of mine, Pepa Zvonek, he was terribly bothered by it, so he even did it once, he went to the reception and borrowed the key to the German doctor's room. There was a new receptionist, he went to the reception and took their key. He went through their whole place and found that the fridge was full of canned blood, syringes in baskets. We knew how it was going, and then it was hard to race those people. They were NDR guys, we gave them four or five minutes one year, the next year they caught us up, and the next year they slipped two minutes in the run."