"Ota Marečků, a famous rower of later years, had to leave our boat because some idiots at the civil engineering faculty where he studied found out that he had somehow falsified a drawing. I said to him, 'If you had told me, I would have helped you with that, I would have ended it.' The unionists or party members got together and wrote a letter to Vodsloň [chairman of the Czechoslovak Union of Physical Education] stating they did not want him to represent our country. Of course, the board reacted to this, and Ota was kicked out of the eighth team, so Jula Točků went there. In Tokyo, of course, we had problems behaving like pedestrians on the road; in Tokyo, you walk and drive on the left, in our country, since 15 March 1939, on the right. It was raining, we spread out the paper umbrellas, he got on his bicycle (Jula) and rode about five hundred meters from where we were staying to the restaurant to eat. It was in the evening–well–and he rode on the right side. Cars weren't allowed in the Olympic Village as public transportation, but there was a supply truck or a doctor in a car, and Jula and the car collided. He had a scar on his shin, over ten centimetres and sixteen stitches. It was just before the finals. Jarda Starostů, who rowed in a four, offered to get in the boat instead of him. We said that was unthinkable. They would have to prove that Jula was downright unfit. Whether they had stitched him up, I don't know, and when we lost the silver medal to the Germans by a metre and a half, every one of us naturally thought that if Jula hadn't had sixteen stitches and hadn't had his leg stitched up, we might have performed better. We told him he was a jerk. That's understandable–we told him even worse words–when he drives on the other side and causes such a problem."
"And suddenly in the basement–we were all already in the basement–the Germans forced us out. There were about five craters in front of the schools from the bombing. It was– It's always glorious in the church– It doesn't matter. I don't remember the date. The Germans forced us out of there to the craters, we stood under the machine guns for two hours in the rain, and they made my father and the other men go to Klíčov near Kbely to remove the barricades. But we didn't know where they were taking them, even though people knew what had happened in Lidice. Me being a child, I was chewing on the tricolour in my mouth, which was originally sewn on my coat. So the war hit us at once. During the bombing, people from the surrounding houses ran to hide in the basements near the kindergarten. It was under Tyrš's gymnasium, but it was hit directly. So there were twenty-five, maybe thirty, dead bodies lined up in the church. We had to go and look at them. I don't know why they took us there."
"I say that the medal is worth gold to me, something tangible that not everybody has. It's beautifully made but it's not the most important thing. What the sport has given me is that since 1965, since that fall, our team of eight and five or six other people have been meeting at the boathouse every Thursday, or if there's a special occasion, we meet somewhere else. Now there will be the Primátorky race in early June. Normally ten or twelve of us get together. Now that's guaranteed to be twenty of us. The friendship– some of my fellow racemates are abroad and will definitely be coming to see the Primátorky race. So that's friendship. We belong in the Guinness Book of World Records. Since 1965–it is now 2022–we've been meeting every Thursday at the boathouse. The exception was the worst period of the coronavirus when the boathouse was practically closed by the police. It wasn't shut down by the cops, the custodian was told in blunt terms that otherwise he would get fired or fined. We meet every Thursday, except for Christmas Eve when we're by the tree, and New Year's Eve, but essentially every Thursday."
Richard Nový was born on 3 April 1937 in Prague. His father, Jiří, came from the Rokycany region but was born in Vienna in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the Second World War, as a native Austrian, he was at risk of being conscripted into the German Wehrmacht. However, his mother bribed the mayor of Rokycany to give her a birth certificate with Bohemia as his place of birth. Richard Nový lived with his parents in Prague-Vysočany at the war’s end and experienced the major Allied bombing of the aerial weapons factories and Kbely airport on 25 March 1945. He was obliged to go to the church where several dozen people were laying dead. During the Prague Uprising, the Germans dragged him, his mother and his father out of their hiding place in the cellar and took the father with other men to an unknown destination. The women and children were left for about two hours at the bombing craters under aimed machine guns. However, the Nový family lived to see the Liberation of Prague by the Red Army in good health. During the post-war years, Richard Nový was a member of Sokol. After the communist coup d’état in February 1948, he performed at the XIth All-Sokol Meeting in Strahov. During the Sokol march through Prague, he and other boys shouted praise to the resigned President Edvard Beneš in front of the new communist President Klement Gottwald. He started rowing at about 15 in Prague in the former Czech Rowing Club, renamed Spartak Praha 4 Polovodiče by communist officials. He was successful in the national championships in both the junior and youth categories. In 1960, he was nominated for the Summer Olympics in Rome, where he dropped out in the semi-finals of the quadruple sculls. During his trips to competitions in the Soviet Union, Switzerland and Italy, he became aware of the abysmal differences in the standard of living and the culture of society in democratic Western Europe and the Eastern Communist Bloc. In parallel with top-level sport, performed at a representative level, he graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Czech Technical University and became a teacher and recognized expert in air engineering and vibration and noise reduction. In 1964, he travelled to Tokyo, Japan, for his second Summer Olympics. He won a bronze medal in the eights. After the Olympics, he retired from the national team and devoted himself to his family and scientific career. Before 1989, he received the title of Candidate of Science (CSc.), but since he was not in the Communist Party, his superiors did not allow him to become an associate professor. He only managed to do so after the Velvet Revolution. At the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, he was selected as head of the department and elected chairman of the academic senate. He raised one daughter with his wife. In 2022, he lived in Prague and had two granddaughters. He and his fellow members of the Tokyo Bronze Eight had been meeting at the boathouse every Thursday since 1965. The only exception was during the most critical period of the coronavirus pandemic.
![Richard Nový at the Prague Primátorky [rowing contest - trans.]. He is standing fourth from the left](https://www.memoryofnations.eu/sites/default/files/2022-10/novy%20richard_2022-05-11%20_fa_14.jpg)
