Vladek Lacina

“1984 meant for me and a lot of athletes a crucial breach and an attack on the Olympic spirit. Nobody told us in advance there would be no Olympic Games for us. All the money and efforts of athletes, trainers and officials was being invested in the preparation. They started to address the issue only two months before departure. The more brutal it was. All the people who were motivated to the maximum and who gave all to the preparation suddenly found out one month before leaving that there were to be no Olympics for them, that they could not participate for reasons which are banal and apparently substitutive and that they had become a part of some political game. I and a number of my colleagues started to reflect for the first time on to what extent the representation of a socialist state is not only a private issue of an athlete. One had become a part of a bigger plan and a game which was not honest. I have never thought about this before. Of course I had been thinking about how could I possibly represent socialist Czechoslovakia when my father was imprisoned at uranium mines for ten years. But I thought of it as if my father had made up for me. That, in a way, by becoming a member of the social elite at that time, a top-level athlete and a national team member, I collected a debt the regime owed me. I don’t know if it was the right way to conceive it. Nevertheless, the Olympics in Los Angeles opened the eyes of many of those, who have not had such an experience before. “

“Rowing enabled me to meet my life partner – my wife Vladimíra. I met her in the rowing club Blesk because army clubs had been only for men, obviously. We got married after six years of dating, in 1975. And so I went to the Olympics in Montreal as a married man; my wife was already about to have a baby. We maintained the rowing tradition in the family as she is also a rower. She had some successes; she was even a national team member for a certain part of her career. Her contribution to my own career was indispensable; she enabled me to pursue my career even at later age when I also had to have a normal job. She took responsibility for the whole family and took care of my first and second son. My first son is deaf, so she had to deal with a lot of additional concerns in this regard. She is the treasure of my life. Without her I would have never finished my career the way I did.”