Jarmila Kratochvílová

„For all my life, I trained on cinder. I have to knock on wood, it worked for me. On cinder, one doesn’t suffer that much, the momentum spreads, there are no kick backs from the tartan. I had always wondered about it but then someone explained to me: ‘You know, Jarmila, first, it was horses which raced on tartan, fast horses. But then their Achilles tendons started to get achy so tartan was sold out to athletes.’ I always recalled how the Achilles tendons suffer and how many athletes have some problems with them. This way, I was told and explained that. I think that it§s true. Because when I trained on cinders, I didn‘t have many health issues. The shoe sort of digs in the cinders and there’s no momentum reverted back to the foot. I think that practicing on cinders was good for something. And when I started at a small meeting in Slatiňany in 400 metres for the first time in my life, I won’t rather tell you the time, there was another coach from Čáslav, he coached boys. And my coach told him: ’Pepík, let me show you a new quarter-mile athlete.‘ But, I lay on the lawn and I was sick. People often get sick after having run this. It‘s the longest spring and there’s nowhere to take. And I heard them and thought: ‘Guess what, I’m not going to run this ever again.’”

„Or, the coach told me: ‘You know what, we will try some diet.’ It was at that time when I did not reach those results as when I would win the national championships. ‘You have to lose weight so you will keep a food log every day.’ I wrote down everything I ate but I need to say that after a month of all sorts of suffering, I lost two kilos but my time worsened by three seconds. So the coach said: ‘This is leading to nowhere, damn it, eat what you want.’ And as I am a village girl, when uncle slaughtered pigs, my mom wouldn’t cook extra meals for me when she cooked for ten or twelve people every day. I ate what others ate. I had meat, it was the basic thing. Soups, those village style thick ones, we had them every day. Sometimes, mom made soup for me with a chunk of beef cooked in it. I would fish it out and eat it with mustard or a bit of salt. But then we had dumplings all the time and I don’t want to claim that molten lard was dripping off the plates but it’s the way it was. And paradoxically, it probably helped me. For me, it worked just fine when I made scrambled eggs, heated a big sausage and went training after such a breakfast. It didn’t cause any issue at all. What was unhealthy for others was healthy for me.”

We were trying all sorts of things. We would see many doctors, someone just told us: ‘Hey, this doctor is good, go to see him to Brno,’ so I went to Brno. At that time, the health supervision for the national team was not on such an advanced level as it was later on. We looked for doctors, each of us, as well as we could, often depending on hearsay – this doctor is good for some sort of thing. This one is good for Achilles’ tendons, that one is good for torn muscles. The coach told me: ‘You can’t stop, you can’t run, you can’t walk too well. We’ll be going to the weight room every day to keep the body doing at least something.’ We did all sorts of exercises in the gym, for one leg only, my arms were okay. And I still couldn’t run and the days were passing by so fast so we tried all sorts of stuff. I don’t even remember what I applied to that leg. I even listened to old women’s advice, I was told things like: ‘Put leaves from [cabbage] head on it.’ So I made a dressing of cabbage. Then someone advised black elder leaves. One tries just about anything and the days pass.”

„On Saturday, I was on the heat-up field and there was Mr. Dajbych, he was the head of the athletics representation. He came to me and asked: ‚So, how have you decided?’ Silence. It was terrible, and I was in such a state of mind that I wondered I might mess it up entirely regardless of what I say. I told him: ‘See, if you could make sure that at least once, they would play the national anthem, I might possibly go for the 800 metres.’ He grabbed my hands like this and said: ‘Jarmila, I promse to you that they will play the anthem twice.’ I became nervous again. So, I say: ‘I will run that.’ I went to the lodgings where the Czechoslovak team was staying and I got a terrible headache. I was glad that there was a doctor who did acupuncture, he stuck a needle somewhere. And said: ‘ Jarmila, look, you need to calm down. You’ve decided now and that’s it.”

„Nobody called, like, no-one at all, at the end, the decision was: You’re not going to the Olympics. I knew that it was the end. As I’ve said, everyone wanted to go to the Olympics but we couldn’t even say it aloud. Nobody would print it, it wouldn’t be said on TV how much we wanted to go to the Olympics, it was clear. I, as the best sportswoman of Czechoslovakia, got almost a political task to write an article to the Czechoslovak Sport magazine about how great it is that we are not going to the Olympics. That was more salt to my wounds, I kept telling myself: Whoa, so now I write something and those people who know me, who know that I want to go there and at my place, in the countryside, everyone knew that I wanted to go… I was glad that the journalist who had called me to Munich the year before and told me that Marita Koch was not going to run and that they sent a late application for me for the 800 metres, called again and told me: ‘Jarmila, I will write that article for you and you will just sign it. Nobody will know it.’ And he really loved athletics, I kept the newspaper clipping for ages. Maybe I could still find it. It gave such an impression that many people had to understand that everyone wants to go but we can’t.”