Jan Smolík

“We lived in the barracks as ordinary soldiers, we had breakfast, lunch, dinner with the soldiers, we ate the same they did. When we came back from breakfast we took off our uniforms, dressed up in cycling gear and set off for our training session. When we finished training we came back, changed into our uniforms, went for lunch. After lunch we took off our uniforms again and dressed in our cycling gear and went to get more practice. And thus it was day by day.”

“During the season, or when preparing for the season, we did nothing but sports. We participated in races, most of the sportsmen at Dukla were in the national team, so we also attended training sessions with the national team. As soon as the season ended, we had to put on our uniforms, and we served as NCOs or COs and worked at the barracks until December. After that we would start to prepare for the new season - the whole of Dukla would generally go to Jedovnice or Ochoz, and we’d fell trees there for three, four weeks.”

“Czechoslovak cyclists were rated according to the Peace Race. They didn’t care about the world championship or the Olympics. If you got a good result in the Peace Race, everything was okay and you could participate in races all around the world. But if you placed badly, everything was bad: the cyclist was blacklisted, he stopped going abroad, he had no funding.”