Jiří Vacek

"Then East Germans who had western Marks started coming in here. They acted like it belonged to them. They behaved terribly, getting drunk and making a mess. Fights with them were nasty, fifty people fighting at a time. There was as much blood as in The Man from Acapulco. The cloakroom attendant would always stand between the coats, clutching a drawer with the money she'd earned on cigarettes and candy. She waited for it to be over. It was wild, the 1990s were wild."

"I got into weightlifting in 1966 when I was twelve and a half. It started when I saw a picture of bodybuilders, something that wasn't common here at the time. Then I saw Steve Reeves who played Romulus in the movie Romulus and Remus, and I was hooked. I thought, I want to have such a nice body. I started working out. We used to work out in Bolevec in the garden with the guys from the neighborhood. We made concrete dumbbells using steel we stole at the scrap yard. Then Michal Ries bought a house in the street opposite us. He was a national weightlifting champion during the First Republic and the war. He would watch us across the street, working out, and one day he came to us and said: 'Boys, you work out here every day, rain or shine. Why don't you try to go weightlifting somewhere. I'll arrange it for you at Slavoj.' I did it until 1983; I competed in weightlifting."