Jul 29: Riccardo Gazzaniga: Vêra Čáslavská-Defiant

The protest of the legendary Czech gymnast, Vêra Čáslavská, in 1968

Riccardo Gazzaniga: The Story of Vêra Čáslavská-Defiant

The Kharlan Smirnov affair brings to mind the story of another sportswoman from an invaded country who made (and paid harshly for) a strong political gesture.

It happened at the 1968 Olympics with Tommie Smith and John Carlos (Black Power salute), yet the story of the great Vêra Čáslavská is almost forgotten.

And this oblivion exists despite the fact that Vêra Čáslavská was one of the greatest gymnasts of all time: 7 Olympic gold and 4 silver medals, 4 world championships, 11 European titles.

For four years, between 1964 and 1968, Vêra Čáslavská was unbeatable (and undefeated) in the individual competition. She is an innovative gymnast, powerful, but not petite like today's gymnasts: she is 1.60 m tall and weighs 58 kg, numbers unthinkable today.

Vêra is also a beautiful woman and in the second half of the 1970s she became a star. She has movie diva fame and in that same 1968 is named the second most famous woman in the world, after Jackie Kennedy.

Before the Olympics, however, Vêra Čáslavská supported Alexander Dubcek's liberal reforms to give freedom to her country oppressed by the USSR.

She signed the anti-communist manifesto 'Two Thousand Words'. When the Russians suppress the 'Prague Spring' in August and regain control of the country, it goes terribly wrong for the dissidents.

The great cross-countryman Emile Zatopek, the human locomotive, is sent to a uranium mine. Vêra is disliked by the new pro-Soviet regime and her participation in the October Olympics is at risk.

Emil Zatopek

Fearing arrest and some form of exile, she hides in a friend's cottage in the Moravian countryside where she was born, training by lifting sacks of potatoes.

"I would hang from trees, do free-body exercises on the front lawn, get calluses on my hands by shoveling coal".

Vêra Čáslavská is so strong and famous that not to let her go to the Olympics would be too sensational even for the new regime.

When they finally allow her to participate in the Olympics, Vêra leaves for Mexico without having trained in the gym or having followed specific programmes to get used to the high altitude climate, with the very high risk of finding herself out of condition.

Instead, she stringed together a series of resounding successes: gold in the individual competition, gold on vault, gold on parallel bars. On beam, a disputed judgement put her second behind Russia's Kuchinskaya.

But in the floor exercise the incredible happens.

At the end of the performances Vêra looks like a clear winner, then the jury, under pressure from the Russian member, makes an almost unprecedented decision and increases the qualification mark (!) of the Russian Larik, who gets the gold, tied with Čáslavská.

It is at this moment that Vêra makes the gesture that marks her personal history and also that of gymnastics: when she has to listen to the Russian anthem she bows her head and refuses to look at the flag with the hammer and sickle representing the invaders of her country.

Actually, she already does this during the award ceremony of Kuchinskaya, the winner of the beam, when Vêra occupies second place on the podium. But when she is at the top of the podium with Larik to share the gold, the image arrives in the homes of all spectators, sharp, powerful.

The Czechoslovak flag goes up together with the Russian flag, the two athletes stand shoulder to shoulder and Vêra Čáslavská bows her head and turns her face with painful grace, without deigning to look at the Russian flag.

It is a discreet but visible form of dissent.

Just as Smith and Carlos raised their fists to show to the world the segregation blacks suffer in America, so Vêra Čáslavská turns her face away and does not honour the flag of the country that crushes her people.

The next day, in Mexico, Vêra marries compatriot and middle-distance runner Josef Odlozil in a glamorous ceremony, but little does she know that her career, the day before, on the podium is over.

As soon as Vêra returns home she is put under investigation by the government for 'improper influences'.

They ask her to retract everything and remove her signature to the liberal manifesto she had adhered to, but she does not, so Czechoslovakia bans her from competitions and denies her employment as a coach. In her nation's pro-Russian regime she becomes 'persona non grata' .

Yet, paradoxically, Vêra cannot leave: she is banned from flying, expatriating, working. Čáslavská earns her living by cleaning, until she gets a job as a sports consultant.

"They wanted to erase me and they succeeded," she recounts.

In addition to government persecution, Čáslavská also faced the terrible trauma of the death of her ex-husband Odlozil, who was killed by their own son in a club during an argument that degenerated into violence.

For all this, Vêra Čáslavská, the champion who dominated sport and the covers of magazines, fell into depression and chose to retire to a nursing home.

"After reaching the top of Olympus, I did not come down the easiest path. My path was of stones, precipitous descents and very deep wells'.

When asked why she never repudiated her protest, she replied:

'If I had repudiated that manifesto and that hope, people who believed in freedom would have lost faith and courage. I wanted them to at least keep hope'.

It was only in the 1990s and 2000s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet regime, that Vêra Čáslavská was rehabilitated and given the honours she deserved, becoming first president of the Czechoslovak and later Czech Olympic Committee, a member of the IOC and an advisor to President Havel.

Vêra died in 2016, from pancreatic cancer she had been fighting against for some time.

In her later years, she has spoken out against xenophobia and in favour of refugee protection. Her story became a docu-film entitled 'Vera68'. (see video below)

Her country named her the 2nd most important athlete of the last century, after Emile Zatopek, and she entered the world gymnastics hall of fame. Despite all this, Vêra Čáslavská's name has remained unknown to many.

That sport and politics do not mix is an absurdity that can only be supported by those who want a world of athletes without a brain, heart, and thoughts—robots for a show to earn medals.

This is not the case, fortunately.

The Vêra Čáslavská and Olga Kharlan exist to remind us of this.

I know Čáslavská’s story well as it is among others included in my book, 'We touched the stars - Stories of champions who changed the world' (@RizzoliLibri ) and in the podcast 'With closed fists' (on @storielibere) dedicated to the 1968 Olympics.

Documentary: VERA 68

Manifesto: Two Thousand Words

“Two Thousand Words that Belong to Workers, Farmers, Officials, Scientists, Artists, and Everybody…

The first threat to our national life was from war. Then came other evil days and events that endangered the nation’s spiritual well being and character. Most of the nation welcomed the socialist program with high hopes. But it fell into the hands of the wrong people. It would not have mattered so much that they lacked adequate experience in affairs of state, factual knowledge or philosophical education, if only they had had enough common prudence and decency to listen to the opinion of others, and agree to being gradually replaced by more able people.

After enjoying great popular confidence after the war, the Communist Party by degrees bartered this confidence away for office – until it had all the offices and nothing else… The leaders’ mistaken policies transformed a political party and an alliance based on ideas into an organisation for exerting power, one that proved attractive to power hungry individuals eager to wield authority, to cowards who took the safe and easy route, and to people with bad conscience. The influx of members such as these affected the character and behaviour of the party, whose internal arrangements made it impossible, short of scandalous incidents, for honest members to gain influence and adapt it continuously to modern conditions. Many communists fought against this decline, but they did not manage to prevent what ensued.

Conditions inside the Communist Party served as both a pattern for and a cause of the identical conditions in the state. The party’s association with the state deprived it of the asset of separation from executive power. No one criticised the activities of the state and of economic organs. Parliament forgot how to hold proper debates; the government forgot how to govern properly; and managers forgot how to manage properly. Elections lost their significance and the law carried no weight. We could not trust our representatives on any committee or, if we could, there was no point in asking them for anything because they were powerless.

Worse still, we could scarcely trust one another. Personal and collective honour decayed. Honestly was a useless virtue, assessment by merit unheard of. Most people accordingly lost interest in public affairs, worrying only about themselves and about money, a further blot on the system being the impossibility today of relying even on the value of money. Personal relations were ruined, there was no more joy in work, and the nation, in short, entered a period that endangered its spiritual well-being and its character…

Since the beginning of this year, we have been experiencing a regenerative process of democratisation. It started inside the Communist Party, that much we must admit – even those communists among us who no longer had hopes that anything good could emerge from that quarter know this. It must also be added, of course, that the process could have started nowhere else. For after 20 years the communists were the only ones able to conduct some sort of political activity. It was only the opposition inside the communist party that had the privilege to voice antagonistic views.

The effort and initiative now displayed by democratically minded communists are only then a partial repayment of the debt owned by the entire party to the non-communists whom it had kept down in an unequal position. Accordingly, thanks are due to the Communist Party, though perhaps it should be granted that the party is making an honest effort at the 11th hour to save its own honour and the nation’s. The regenerative process has introduced nothing particularly new into our lives. It revives ideas and topics, many of which are older than the errors of our socialism, while others, having emerged from below the surface of visible history, should long ago have found expression but were instead repressed…

In this moment of hope – albeit hope still threatened – we appeal to you. It took several months before many of us believed it was safe to speak up; many of us still do not think it is safe. But speak up we did, exposing ourselves to the extent that we have no choice but to complete our plan to humanise the regime. If we did not, the old forces would exact cruel revenge. We appeal about all to those who so far have waited on the sidelines. The time now approaching will decide events for years to come…

There has been great alarm recently over the possibility that foreign forces will intervene in our development. Whatever superior forces may face us, all we can do is stick to our own positions, behave decently and initiate nothing ourselves. We can show our government that we will stand by it, with weapons if need be, if it will do what we give it a mandate to do. And we can assure our allies that we will observe our treaties of alliance, friendship and trade. Irritable reproaches and ill-argued suspicions on our part can only make things harder for our government, and bring no benefit to ourselves…

This spring a great opportunity was given to us once again, as it was after the end of the war. Again we have the chance to take into our own hands our common cause, which for working purposes we call socialism, and give it a form more appropriate to our once good reputation and to be fairly good opinion we used to have ourselves. The spring is over and will never return. By winter we will know all…”