Adolfína Tačová

“I remember starting on the balance beam early the next morning. I can't even tell you what I've been through. An absolute concentration. My coach always told me: 'Focus on the first discipline, and don't think about anything else. Think about what you're doing. The step, the jump, the jumping on the tools and then you're on.' I'll tell you it worked. We used a lot of personal psychological training, the one that takes place in the head and does not take place in real life. This was recommended to us by our coach, who was a good psychologist and said, 'Girls, you have to get that thing in your brain. When you fall asleep, you will go through the sequence nicely, three times in a row, from start to finish. I applied it and the fact is that it got stuck in my head and it worked. All four World Championships we passed, no one could afford to fall off the beam. If we fell from the beam, we would not get a medal.”

“When we returned home after the war, it was a terrible as the Soviet army that liberated us moved into the playground, not far from our houses. The army was there and they needed to eat and they needed to take the cattle again to feed the army. An officer came and took the cow. That was stressful for my mother, she said, 'How can we handle this?' I have three sisters, we are four girls, two older sisters, one younger, and it was terrible. So the aunt who lived in a house nearby went on to the playground and begged the officer to be kind enough to return the cow to us that there were four children and that we were no rich and that it was our livelihood. He returned the cow to us, which was amazing. Nice memory of that time.”