Mgr. Aleš Suk

"We just look at who has good lower extremity work, who is tip-toeing, who is spontaneously active. Because we got there when the break was starting. You could already tell. Three of the kids peeked in and saw the jump rope lying around, and they took it, and they were jumping or playing hopscotch or tug-of-war. Those were active kids. By then, we had five or six of them picked out and we watched them move around in gym class. Working out, stretching, running around, practising new things, playing ball games, and we said, 'We like these five kids from this year's class.' They had already gotten printed invitations that we were inviting them to test for sports classes in a month. That's how we went around to ten fourth-grade classes in the area, so we tested some ten times twenty-five kids, two hundred and fifty kids. We picked sixty kids out of that and invited them. We gave them motor tests that we had prepared. Then we did a ranking and got questionnaires that the parents filled out, where we surveyed the aptitudes of the parents and grandparents as well. Because if anyone in the family was obese, how tall were daddy and mummy, how much did the grandparents weigh as adults, did they do any sports, and did they have any results? We processed that, and that was another ancillary criterion. When we had kids on the borderline of 20 and 25, and if they were different in the parents' prognosis, we tended to put them in there because we knew there would be support from the parents. That it wouldn't be like 'You have practice today on Sunday, but we'd like to go to Grandma's.' Like we always told the parents, 'These kids are doing this for themselves because the sport and the preparation doesn't just mean they're going to be medalists. There will be a few, there won't be more. But these kids will learn to be responsible, to do the tasks they're given. They learn to be resilient, they learn to have values, and they learn that if they put in the work, they get better and better and better. And those are the qualities for life that they gain through that training and that preparation. And those are far more significant, in our view, than a collection of medals.'"

"From the second year on, they kept trying to convince me to join the Communist Party as a Russian language student. I managed to turn it down twice because of my study obligations, and when they came the third time, really, that was in '68, I said, 'Don't let the comrades be angry, but I don't feel mature enough to help the party yet.' So that was my third rejection. After that, nothing happened until they came to me in '72, when I bought a trip to the Olympic Games in Munich, a tourist trip as a spectator, from the money I had already saved as a cantor, and suddenly the director of the Secondary School of Economics in Turnov, where I had taught for five years, called me in and told me that there were State Security guys from Hradec Králové. I was scared, what happened. Of course, they had a report from the Sportturist travel agency that I was going to Munich, so they came to ask why I was going there, and I said, 'I'm a graduate of a sports school, so I'd like to see what top sport looks like at its best.' 'We'd need you to observe some unusual objects there, and to take some photographs, and to tell us about it.' I naively said, 'And what would it entail if I refused?' - 'Well, you might have trouble leaving.' So I said, 'Well, I'll try to get something.' - 'Well, now sign it for us.' I said, 'Jesus Christ!' I tried to change my signature, so I wrote it mirror-signed, left-leaning. They didn't confront it with anything and they left. So I thought, 'Good.' We were living privately, and we were driven to Munich from Ebersberg, about thirty kilometres away. We stayed with a very nice lady, and we wrote to each other for about five years after that. Nothing happened for a long time. After about a month, the State Security comrades came again and now they started to question me. I thought: 'This is a mess. What will I tell them.' I know that we drove from Ebersberg past some gas tanks that were close to the ground, these big shiny balls, so I said, 'Well, we drove past that... But I don't have a camera.' There were no mobile phones then, so I couldn't take a picture of it. 'But I will describe it all to you.'"