Stanislav Buchta

"We went to Russia at the end of the season and it was a nice trip. We flew to Moscow by plane. From Moscow to the Far East, Kirovsk and Vladivostok, we went by train. Three days and three nights by train and all the foreign expeditions went together. It was tremendous fun. Everybody had two suitcases of stuff, because when we arrived in Russia, everybody came running to us and everybody wanted to buy something. So the races weren't that much of a priority, but it was such an amazing bazaar. We were in Moscow buying gold again. The dealers would come with us and offer us cameras and things like that."

"When we switched to juniors, at the age of eighteen, when I was studying at grammar school, we already got to the first races in Austria and Germany, where we regularly went to New Year's races. And that's where we started to realize the difference and where the line between the West and the East was. That was a shock for us. There were undercover agents there, introducing themselves as team leaders, and we didn't know them. They were keeping an eye on us, who we were meeting with, and they were reporting information on us, who we were associating with. It was uncomfortable until we found out they were watching us. Then when we got to the West later on in those junior years, those emigrants would come to watch us athletes from Czechoslovakia and try to talk to us. When someone approached us, we responded. Well, in the evening the gentleman in question came and said, 'Gentlemen, just say hello to these people, but don't talk to them more, otherwise it won't be good.'"

"According to the results at the national championships, where we were regularly reaching for medals, we were included in the association's selection, when they sent us to the GDR or Poland to participate in friendly competitions, and that was the first time we were 14 years old to go abroad to play sports. We used to go to the GDR. First of all, we didn't understand them, because they didn't speak Russian, right. So we preferred to be friends with the guys from Poland. But those were the guys who did business, and we were kind of too decent compared with them. But it was always a lot of fun."