Mgr. Aleš Suk

* 1946

  • "Today, we have waxes from 150 companies in the museum in Branná. It's the largest collection in Europe, we have 1200 of them. 300 are on display, and another 900 are in the depository. When I started to discover that in the attic of the Tyrš House in Vrchlabí, there were five pairs of old skis tucked under a beam, dusty, left there by the Germans from the German Skiers' Association in Vrchlabí, I said: 'I'll collect those skis too.' I have several thousand ski postcards and 3000 ski badges. And now I started to accumulate it at home: sledges, skates, hockey sticks, just everything that has to do with winter sports, so eight years ago I wrote a letter to the municipal council that I would like to offer my collection to the municipality for loan and that there could be a Museum of the history of white sport in Podkrkonoší, that it would affect the medal achievements of our former charges. So we started to think about where this museum could be."

  • "We just look at who has good lower extremity work, who is tip-toeing, who is spontaneously active. Because we got there when the break was starting. You could already tell. Three of the kids peeked in and saw the jump rope lying around, and they took it, and they were jumping or playing hopscotch or tug-of-war. Those were active kids. By then, we had five or six of them picked out and we watched them move around in gym class. Working out, stretching, running around, practising new things, playing ball games, and we said, 'We like these five kids from this year's class.' They had already gotten printed invitations that we were inviting them to test for sports classes in a month. That's how we went around to ten fourth-grade classes in the area, so we tested some ten times twenty-five kids, two hundred and fifty kids. We picked sixty kids out of that and invited them. We gave them motor tests that we had prepared. Then we did a ranking and got questionnaires that the parents filled out, where we surveyed the aptitudes of the parents and grandparents as well. Because if anyone in the family was obese, how tall were daddy and mummy, how much did the grandparents weigh as adults, did they do any sports, and did they have any results? We processed that, and that was another ancillary criterion. When we had kids on the borderline of 20 and 25, and if they were different in the parents' prognosis, we tended to put them in there because we knew there would be support from the parents. That it wouldn't be like 'You have practice today on Sunday, but we'd like to go to Grandma's.' Like we always told the parents, 'These kids are doing this for themselves because the sport and the preparation doesn't just mean they're going to be medalists. There will be a few, there won't be more. But these kids will learn to be responsible, to do the tasks they're given. They learn to be resilient, they learn to have values, and they learn that if they put in the work, they get better and better and better. And those are the qualities for life that they gain through that training and that preparation. And those are far more significant, in our view, than a collection of medals.'"

  • "From the second year on, they kept trying to convince me to join the Communist Party as a Russian language student. I managed to turn it down twice because of my study obligations, and when they came the third time, really, that was in '68, I said, 'Don't let the comrades be angry, but I don't feel mature enough to help the party yet.' So that was my third rejection. After that, nothing happened until they came to me in '72, when I bought a trip to the Olympic Games in Munich, a tourist trip as a spectator, from the money I had already saved as a cantor, and suddenly the director of the Secondary School of Economics in Turnov, where I had taught for five years, called me in and told me that there were State Security guys from Hradec Králové. I was scared, what happened. Of course, they had a report from the Sportturist travel agency that I was going to Munich, so they came to ask why I was going there, and I said, 'I'm a graduate of a sports school, so I'd like to see what top sport looks like at its best.' 'We'd need you to observe some unusual objects there, and to take some photographs, and to tell us about it.' I naively said, 'And what would it entail if I refused?' - 'Well, you might have trouble leaving.' So I said, 'Well, I'll try to get something.' - 'Well, now sign it for us.' I said, 'Jesus Christ!' I tried to change my signature, so I wrote it mirror-signed, left-leaning. They didn't confront it with anything and they left. So I thought, 'Good.' We were living privately, and we were driven to Munich from Ebersberg, about thirty kilometres away. We stayed with a very nice lady, and we wrote to each other for about five years after that. Nothing happened for a long time. After about a month, the State Security comrades came again and now they started to question me. I thought: 'This is a mess. What will I tell them.' I know that we drove from Ebersberg past some gas tanks that were close to the ground, these big shiny balls, so I said, 'Well, we drove past that... But I don't have a camera.' There were no mobile phones then, so I couldn't take a picture of it. 'But I will describe it all to you.'"

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    Vrchlabí, 02.03.2023

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If you work hard, the work will be good

Aleš Suk in 1964, graduation photo
Aleš Suk in 1964, graduation photo
photo: Witness archive

Aleš Suk was born on 8 September 1946 in Hradec Králové into a family with four generations of cantors. His parents often moved around the region of eastern Bohemia, but they considered the village of Železnice u Jičína to be the place where their roots were. Both parents taught, and the father, Zbyněk Suk, studied art education and gymnastics and lived a long, active life. His personality influenced several generations of his students. He was expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) for his political views and support for the Prague Spring during the normalization period and was forced to leave school and work manually. His son Aleš studied physical education and Russian language at the ITVS in Prague, taught briefly at the Secondary School of Economics in Turnov and has lived in Vrchlabí since 1976. He became a cross-country skiing coach and together with Jan Červinka founded and led the SVSM (Association of Top Youth Sports). The association had strong official support, and young skiers under the guidance of the coaches showed excellent results. After November 1989, the association ceased to exist. Aleš Suk started to train youth with the same enthusiasm after he started to teach PE at the primary school in Vrchlabí. With his personal dedication and excellent coaching methods, he brought up many excellent runners, some of whom later won medals at the Olympic Games. Aleš Suk has been collecting everything related to skiing all his life. Over the years, he has amassed an impressive collection of unique artefacts, which he has lent to the Ski Museum in his home town of Dolní Branná. His work with youth has been recognized as a Lifetime Commitment to Sport. He was named Sportsman of the Year in 2020 and inducted into the Ski Association of the Czech Republic Hall of Fame in 2023.