Michal Klasa

“Franta Jurza nominated me for the race around Holland, it’s a very interesting race even today, dangerous; I ended up fourth in prologue. Until then, no foreigner had managed to reach top ten in Holland. When I crossed the finishing line, they automatically extended my time by a minute. Jirka Daler had been measuring it, and luckily he went to them and found out that the knew about my time, but that they’d given me an extra minute because it wasn’t possible for a foreigner to be so fast. Then came the second stage, I reached the first group of twelve, but I had puncture. That got me into the second group, and I reckoned: ‘Well that’s it for me, I can’t win now,’ and I was careless in taking one bend, and I hit a parked car. I broke my left shinbone, bruised my face, and ended up in hospital. I was in hospital in Holland for three weeks, then they took me to Prague, to Střešovice, and a week later to the military hospital in Brno. But the leg wasn’t healing after the operation. Four months passed, and thanks to Franta Jurza I became a patient of Professor Slavík. It slowly started to heal, so that I started cycling freely again after five months, but I broke my leg again on a down pedal. I rode to the hospital in Přerov on my bike, pedalling with one leg, the other held in the air. When I came to the surgery claiming I had refractured my left shinbone, they started laughing, but when they checked it out, they confirmed it. Franta Jurza arranged for another helicopter to Prague, and Professor Slavík performed another surgery on me. Three months later I started cycling, I actually hadn’t raced for a year, I hadn’t ridden a bike for ten months, and then I won the Peace Race qualification in Pardubice.”

“When I was in Montreal at the world championships for the first time, that was in 1974, so shortly after Sixty-Eight, we were visited by an enormous amount of them boys (emigrants). They were doing well, but they were all, or at least ninety-five per cent of them, were frustrated by the fact they were banned from coming back here. They always told us: ‘Perhaps we wouldn’t even return, but the fact that we’re not allowed to is gripping us terribly.’ And it’d grip me too, I wouldn’t be able to endure it.”

“I’m sure that doping existed, that the East Germans had huge laboratories, that they had almost a hundred doctors who focused solely on cycling. Docent Chundela, head of the doping laboratory, said that they had something somewhere, but that he didn’t know what. Just as it is now, the substances were kept several years, to allow them to retrospectively find out what they don’t yet know. So I don’t know if anyone was ‘on’ something, but the doping tests were pretty strict, and we certainly didn’t have the chemicals necessary to do something like that. It was a time when the non-doping era had ended, regular doping tests had begun, but doping hadn’t developed to the extent it did, say, in 1988 and later. I don’t know if anyone was using something, certainly none of our cyclists had anything.”