Jan Smolík

* 1942

The Army of the Protectorate Bohemia-Moravia, The Sportsmen
21. 8. 1968 - Invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, 17. 11. - 29. 12. 1989 - The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, 18. - 21. 8. 1969 – mass demonstrations against Soviet occupation
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    The sportsman’s year at Dukla Brno

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    “During the season, or when preparing for the season, we did nothing but sports. We participated in races, most of the sportsmen at Dukla were in the national team, so we also attended training sessions with the national team. As soon as the season ended, we had to put on our uniforms, and we served as NCOs or COs and worked at the barracks until December. After that we would start to prepare for the new season - the whole of Dukla would generally go to Jedovnice or Ochoz, and we’d fell trees there for three, four weeks.”

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    “Czechoslovak cyclists were rated according to the Peace Race”

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    duration: 00:42
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    “Czechoslovak cyclists were rated according to the Peace Race. They didn’t care about the world championship or the Olympics. If you got a good result in the Peace Race, everything was okay and you could participate in races all around the world. But if you placed badly, everything was bad: the cyclist was blacklisted, he stopped going abroad, he had no funding.”

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    Military service at Dukla Brno

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    “In 1961 I started my military service as a conscript at Dukla, and I stayed there until 1975. It was very difficult to get into Dukla at the time because they only took two or three cyclists from the whole of Czechoslovakia. There was always a lot of competition for those three places. I was originally supposed to join Dukla Pardubice, but I’d caught the eye of Mr Jursa, the trainer at Dukla Brno, and he had me switched to his detachment.”

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    The life of an army sportsman

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    duration: 00:36
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    “We lived in the barracks as ordinary soldiers, we had breakfast, lunch, dinner with the soldiers, we ate the same they did. When we came back from breakfast we took off our uniforms, dressed up in cycling gear and set off for our training session. When we finished training we came back, changed into our uniforms, went for lunch. After lunch we took off our uniforms again and dressed in our cycling gear and went to get more practice. And thus it was day by day.”

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    Zlín, 09.04.2014

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We sportsmen knew that there’s a rough side to everything

Jan Smolík
Jan Smolík
photo: Paměť národa
photo: Paměť národa
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Jan Smolík, born on 24 December 1942 in Lipník nad Bečvou, watched a stage of the Peace Race in 1957 and was so enthused by the event that he decided there and then to fully devote himself to cycling. In the years 1961 to 1972 he cycled for Dukla Brno. In 1964 he won the Peace Race, and four years later he took part in the Olympic Games in Mexico. In 1972 and 1974 he was employed as a trainer at Dukla Brno, he then worked for Industrial Constructions Brno. In 1976 he took up employment as a trainer at youth sports centre in Brno. When the sports centre was shut down (1991), he was unemployed for a brief time, then worked as a lorry driver for about six months, before starting up a wholesale company selling sports equipment, which he managed until his retirement.

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