"The year 1968 was significant for me - not for me, for all of us - precisely because it was the year of the occupation of the Soviet, i.e. all the armies of the Warsaw Pact at that time, who came to protect us, as it were, they said. I just experienced a lot of fear for my children in that year, 1968. I was already a trainer and I was with the children at the training camp. Between Kladno and Nové Strašecí, Rakovnik, there is a pond called Bucek, and Poldovka, for which I was competing, had a recreation center there, log cabins, and it was between the forest and the village of Třtice. We were just on the day that the Russian soldiers came in, and we were on the twentieth, because they came in on the twenty-first, and on the twentieth we put the kids to bed, and we as coaches were still sitting around drinking coffee and talking. And now we were like, 'Hey, you hear those bangs?' Those were terrible bangs, right next to us. And we were like, I don't know what that could be, and we were making up shit. But we woke up in the morning, and my coach was out there cooking for the kids. And in the morning he went shopping and he came in and he said, 'Jesus, now hold on, what did I see... We've got Russian soldiers in the woods against us.' And I thought, what would they be doing here? I mean, we didn't turn on the radio in the morning, because every morning at seven o'clock was the wake-up call, and we'd run right out to warm up, so there was no radio at all, just music. And he says, 'And they're cutting down trees in the woods and putting up their tents there,' and we kept saying why would they do that, I guess that's how the Allied soldiers in Czechoslovakia do their training. So that was the day they arrived there. And the next morning, all of a sudden we see the parents arriving, one, then the other, at seven o'clock in the morning, six-thirty. I said, 'Guys, what the fuck are you doing here? We don't wake up until seven o'clock.' - 'Don't you know anything?' And I said: 'What should we know?' - 'Don't you know that we were attacked by the Russians?'"
