Jiří Sýkora

"I was in the Top Sports Centre, I got there after the Olympics. Well, in '83, when they actually started to sort of legalize doping in sport, like it wasn't official, but it sort of had the support of the state, so there was sort of this top athlete's ten commandments for the centre, where one of those points was that I would submit to supportive treatment. Now, when I asked what that supportive treatment was, well, it was the supportive substances, the anabolics and the various doping things. Well, I refused to sign it because I knew of various cases where these people had died or had a defective baby born without an arm and things like that, which we didn't talk about. So I refused to sign it, so I was expelled from the Top Sports Centre."

"So the final was pretty much like every other race I had run up to that point. Because I actually dove into that race and at the third kilometer, when I looked at the timing clock, it was eight zero seven or eight. So I thought to myself, this is not going to be a big deal, because we used to run such intermediate times as standard in races in the Czech Republic in some of those leagues. Then actually it kind of took off and the last fifteen hundred meters were like really fast, and that's how the time 13:24.99 came about, it's a Czech record, or at that time it was a Czechoslovak record, but it's still a Czech record, nobody has broken it yet."