Bohumír Zeman

“People got involved who had very little in common with skiing. Rather, they kept us under constant supervision and pushed us into things that we didn’t like, weren’t interested in and it somehow drew away our strength. I minded it very much. We were trained by engineer Horák, a technician, I don’t know what his education was like… Of course, he was a trainer, he could ski, but I think he didn’t know how to deal with people and he did things people should not be doing one to another.”

“We drove to Alps by car, so only the journey over the border took us three or four hours. The border stop really took this long, as sometimes they let us wait an hour or two and then they searched us, indeed thoroughly, for about two or three hours. We had to fill in a custom declaration, where serial numbers of all of our skis were entered, we also smuggled foreign money hidden in the sticks – money we had bought before from a local illegal money-changer (laughs), these were serious crimes, these things. And they really bullied us. If anyone of us had long hair, they cut it.”

“I was – physically – relatively precocious. Already at fifteen I was close to the level of the national team. As a junior I was officially made older, I could compete against older juniors and men. Then there was this accident that Dukla representatives from Liberec were not allowed to go abroad as they had one-off travel permits while we as students had permanent ones. When we returned from our camp – there was no snow – only we could travel abroad so I competed in my first ever World Cup event at sixteen and I managed to score FIS points that made me eligible for the World Cup. I was given a chance in January, scored some points again and at seventeen could compete at the World Championship in St Moritz.”

“Horák as a trainer always had money for out training trip. Now he said he had none. I had a contract with Elan, which was no one was allowed to know, or at least in part so that some money on my behalf were sent to Pragosport, where I had an account and where they always took away a half. I had some money so I offered to pay for it. And when we were leaving I noticed Horák, taking receipts from the reception. I asked him to hand them over to me. He refused, so I grabbed him by his neck, shouted at him but didn’t really hurt him physically. And for this I was then disqualified for life from the national team.”