Vlasta Machová

"I was at the Youth Festival in Sofia in August '68. It was a wonderful race. You could compare it to a Universiade or a small Olympic Games. We had a tremendous time there. We ran, we had afternoon programs. We cheered on other athletes, those who played volleyball, basketball and other sports. It was a gathering of young people. They took us on trips, too. Sofia is a town under the high mountain Vitosha, where they go even today for holidays. We went through the Vitosha there. In short, it was beautiful. The Bulgarians speak a language that is similar to Russian, and we were able to speak Russian with them. When we had meetings together, they would say to us, 'You are poor,' and we wondered, 'Why should we be poor? How did you find out?' 'They are occupying you, there is almost a war!' So we looked at them and said, "There is peace in our country, what are they talking about? Then, when we came home on August 19, we were calm, nothing was happening. On the morning of the twenty-first, my mother woke us up with tears in her eyes, saying that there was a war."

"My teacher introduced me to athletics. He brought me to Ústí for training. I didn't want to go there because I didn't know anyone there. So then when he asked me how the training was and I said, 'I wasn't there,' he said, 'Come to the blackboard, count.' When I had to count the examples that we hadn't even learned yet, and I did it, then the next thing was history and that was a little bit worse, I didn't even prepare for that. Then I thought, 'I'll start going there and that'll be it!' So I started going to athletics, and if someone had said to me a month later, 'You're not going to go,' I would have probably regretted it."