Gabriel Janoušek

* 1940

  • "There is no 'if' in sport or in life, that's for starters. We rode a pretty good race, on the penultimate gate, which was the upstream gate on the right side. I was the left bowman, my partner Milan Horyna was the right sternman, we went into a stopper in the forthcoming upstream gate and unfortunately we made the same mistake. I goon stroked too hard, Milan didn't turn the boat on its belly against the sternman enough at the back, and we capsized. Because we had well-made seats we couldn't climb out, the paramedics pulled us out, we breathed in a little bit of water. There's the 'if'. If this hadn't happened, we would have got through the last gate cleanly and probably won, which we didn't. But there is no 'if'." - "You said your wife was watching it on TV and was about to open the champagne." - "That's just a bit of juicy detail. My wife was watching it on TV with my former partner, Lída Sirotková. She was sitting at the border in the Czech Republic in Šumava, where there was German television, German television didn't go around the republic at that time, so they went there to watch. They saw the whole race broadcast on German TV. They showed the time and the penalty points, and according to that they thought that we were actually at the finish line, that it was great. They opened the champagne, it popped, and that's when we capsized."

  • "About the 1968, I remember one interesting thing that is related to sports. Back in 1969, the World Championships were planned in Bourg-Saint-Maurice, France. There was a training camp there, by the water we forgot what had happened, the East Germans were there, and we were even friends. The water causes that people are friendlier. The Germans avoided us, they didn't talk to us. We always did fuss, even at the World Cup it was repeated. Our sport was one of the poor - we slept in tents, although some were already sleeping in hotels. We had a camp next to the East Germans. Every morning they raised a flag and shouted something, I don't remember what. In the evening we decided to raise a different flag. We found some – I am sorry - shitted long underwear and we put it up on a flagpole in the middle of their camp. In the morning, when they woke up, there was an overwhelming fuss, the German expedition packed up and left. The ČSTV [Czechoslovak Union of Physical Education - trans.] demanded that we leave immediately too. The chairman of the ČSTV canoeists, Ota Halík, who was responsible for this, fled to the mountains for three days so that no one from the ČSTV would reach him. And we stayed there, which is interesting, and it was heroic of Ota, who has long since died. Whatever it was, it was an act that deserves to be recorded."

  • "I also take resistance after my mother, who - although she was very short - was in prison first in Minkovice near Liberec, then in Pardubice. After a year in prison, they didn't tell her where her children were. She had herself summoned to the superintendent, explaining that she would like to know where her children were. No one told her anything, my mother got angry, even though she was tiny, took a typewriter and threw it at the investigator. Later, when she got home, she had to pay for breaking it. She paid it off gradually. It was deducted from her salary."

  • "Of course, he tried to do that when the Communists found out about his work and the work of the whole group. He tried to escape, he had organized it quite well. Unfortunately, he hired a man, an associate of the State Security, who led him straight into the hands of the border guards. He was arrested at the border, and so began a fate that affected the whole family, especially the children. My father had everything arranged, prepared, even our transport abroad, mother and children. But father was caught, and everything fell apart. Father had a gun, and when he was caught, he didn't fire. I don't know if that's a good thing, I'm against guns like my dad. A very cruel period began, not only my father was arrested, but also my mother. They were in custody for a long time, where they were interrogated. The trials, as was the custom in the fifties, were staged. They were both charged with high treason, my father first got life imprisonment, my mother five years. He appealed, mother didn't. Her lawyer advised her that there was no point, her guilt was that she hadn't denounced her husband that was life. Horrible, I don't like to remember it. After the appeal, my father got 15 years, my mother got five years, we were left alone in the house."

  • "It sounds silly, but I was ashamed of it then, because everyone said to me, 'Your parents are locked up!' And at the age of ten, I felt I had to be ashamed of it. Because of shutting someone down, I imagined he was a thief, a murderer, a robber or whatever. But unfortunately, the parents took a completely different side. And I came... only after graduating from the Pilsen school, when there was an educator named Heim, I remember that to this day, who made me aware of it every day. 'You are the son of criminals!' So there I realized that it was not true at all that my parents were fighting for something that was worth it."

  • "I still had high ambitions. To express my defiance at least in some way, I wanted to be the best at something. I did all kinds of sports, from skiing to canoeing. In canoeing, specifically in water slalom, I got into the national team, with which I won several world championships, including the Olympics in Munich. It was such a satisfaction of mine that I was able to do it, even though I was trampled into the dirt, so that I was not able to move on."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha 2, 12.12.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 40:19
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Praha, 24.06.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:34:35
    media recorded in project Tipsport for Legends
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

The water was fair, the regime was not. Mother was locked up for five years, father for fifteen

Going down the river in 1972
Going down the river in 1972
photo: archiv pamětníka

Gabriel Janoušek was born on 29 November 1940 in Turnov. He had a sister a year older than him and at home he was called nothing but Borek, which carried over into his whole life. His father, Gabriel Janoušek, was an officer in the Czechoslovak army before the war, and during the war he joined the resistance. In the spring of 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned by the Nazis in Terezín, from where he was taken to the concentration camps of Flossenburg and Dachau. In May 1945, he returned home alive, but his children did not recognize him. After the communist coup in February 1948, Gabriel Janoušek started a resistance against the totalitarian regime. After his arrest, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for high treason. His wife, Božena, was imprisoned for five years because she had not denounced her husband. The children were brought up separately by their aunts, their father’s and their mother’s sisters. Mother spent the whole five years in prison, and father was released after ten years in an amnesty in 1960. After elementary school, Gabriel Janoušek entered the electrical engineering apprenticeship for precision equipments, because as the son of a traitor he was not allowed to study high school. Only then was he allowed to study at an eleven-year night school, which was a grammar school at that time. After two years of compulsory military service and after several attempts he managed to get into distance studies at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT). From childhood he was involved in canoeing. At the 1965 World Championships in Spittal an der Drau, Austria, he won a gold medal in the mixed pairs canoe and a silver medal in the patrol race with Lída Sirotková. At the 1967 World Championships in Czechoslovakia, he and Milan Horyna won silver medals in both the wildwater canoeing and slalom. He and Milan Horyna finished third at the 1969 World Championships in France and second at the 1971 World Championships in Italy. At the 1972 Summer Olympics in the Federal Republic of Germany their boat capsized in the penultimate gate, otherwise they would not have missed a medal. They finished in 11th place. After the Olympics, he retired from the national team. He worked at the ČVUT as a researcher, his specialization was cybernetics. Because of his parents’ imprisonment in the 1950s, he was not allowed to teach until the fall of communism in 1989. Then his dream came true, and he became a lecturer at ČVUT. He retired in 2010. In 2022 he lived alternately in Prague and Špindlerův Mlýn. He still rafted with his friends and participated in dragon boat races. He and his wife raised a son, one grandson is a snowboarder, the other a hockey player.