Jan Smolík

“During the season, or when preparing for the season, we did nothing but sports. We participated in races, most of the sportsmen at Dukla were in the national team, so we also attended training sessions with the national team. As soon as the season ended, we had to put on our uniforms, and we served as NCOs or COs and worked at the barracks until December. After that we would start to prepare for the new season - the whole of Dukla would generally go to Jedovnice or Ochoz, and we’d fell trees there for three, four weeks.”

“Czechoslovak cyclists were rated according to the Peace Race. They didn’t care about the world championship or the Olympics. If you got a good result in the Peace Race, everything was okay and you could participate in races all around the world. But if you placed badly, everything was bad: the cyclist was blacklisted, he stopped going abroad, he had no funding.”

“In 1961 I started my military service as a conscript at Dukla, and I stayed there until 1975. It was very difficult to get into Dukla at the time because they only took two or three cyclists from the whole of Czechoslovakia. There was always a lot of competition for those three places. I was originally supposed to join Dukla Pardubice, but I’d caught the eye of Mr Jursa, the trainer at Dukla Brno, and he had me switched to his detachment.”