On 20th August 1968, some 4,600 tanks from Warsaw Pact countries entered Prague. Thus ended the Spring led by Dubček and endorsed by the “Two Thousand Words Manifesto” signed by a Czechoslovak celebrity couple, among others: Emil Zátopek and his wife Dana, born Ingrova.
Dana was an outstanding javelin thrower, while her husband Emil, as London newspaper The Times read, was “one of the greatest ever to run on a track”. However, for both of them, the most important victory probably consisted in enduring the oblivion and discrimination the regime forced upon them for their civic engagement.
The reasons why the union between Dana and Emil is unique in history are numerous. In a lifetime together they made revolution, they wrote Olympic history and they defied the shackles of a totalitarian regime.
Yet the couple also became legend for the several funny stories that generations of sports journalists have collected over the decades. And which now, after Dana’s death (on 13th March 2020), are pivotal in joining the pieces of a probably unrepeatable story.
Dana and Emil met in June 1948. Emil was coming back from the races in Zlìn, where he had outclassed all the other athletes. The bus made a stop in Lanžhot, where Dana Ingrova was living at the time. They met at a party and danced together, at a time when dancing meant committing to something important.
If Emil was already well-known, Dana’s talent was emerging in all its class. Before making history as a javelin thrower, she was an outstanding handball player. Then, during high school, she had the opportunity to hold a javelin in her hand. It is said that on her first throw she reached 34 metres. A week later she won the Czechoslovak national javelin throwing championship.
It was love at first sight between Emil and Dana and it was sealed by a strange coincidence: they were born on the exact same day in 1922. A funny issue, which nevertheless caused Emil’s mother much concern: it did not bode well for her son to be with a woman who had potentially been born before him. It took the birth records of both of them to ensure that Emil, born at midnight, had come into the world a few hours before Dana had.
In the summer of 1948, shortly before their departure for London Olympics, Emil and Dana met in Uherské Hradiště. It was very hot, but instead of diving into the Morava River, they decided to climb the branches of a blossoming linden tree.
Of that encounter Dana recounted how the bees buzzed and they occasionally kissed, trying to keep their balance between the branches. “We were happy. At least until Emil solemnly said to me, without warning: ‘What if we got married?’. I was speechless. Until then our love was fun, fresh, with no problems and no duties. I answered that it would not be fun any longer that way. But he replied, very seriously: ‘Marriage does not necessarily have to be boring or prison’ ’’.
And they were never bored during their 52-year marriage, which ended in 2000 with Emil's death.
They bought the rings during London Olympics (“After so many days of war, bombs, death and hunger, the return of the Games was like the return of the sun”, Emil would later recount) in a goldsmith’s shop near Piccadilly Circus and got married in Uherske Hradiste on 24th October. They knew from the eve of the wedding that it would be an eventful life as a couple. For the wedding lunch they decided to eat pheasants, which “we tied to the handlebars of Emil’s bicycle. Suddenly, on the way home, a dog came out of the fields and ran straight into the wheels of the bike. Emil got off uninjured, I hurt both knees and broke my nose”.
It was the beginning of a journey that would lead them to one of the most memorable days in the history of world sport. On 24th July 1952 at Helsinki Olympics, Emil broke all records in the 5,000 metre run and brought home three gold medals; Dana won a gold medal with her javelin. Competitions were supposed to take place at the same time, but due to Józsa Csermák’s world record in the hammer throw, the start of the javelin competition was postponed. So Dana spent the famous Race of the Century in the bowels of Helsinki Olympic Stadium, unaware of what Emil was doing.
“I asked the first person I met in the corridor for news. It was Romanov, a Russian coach. He rolled his eyes as if looking at someone who had just fallen off the moon. He could not accept that I had missed the most dramatic race, in which Emil had won in such an incredible way, Dana recounted. “When they set up the javelins they were playing the national anthems. I met Emil for a moment and without thinking I said to him: ‘Lend me your medal, maybe it will bring me luck’. He threw it towards my bag”.
In the press conference after Dana’s victory, Zátopek tried to take credit for the victory as a talisman. “Really? Then go inspire another girl and see if she can throw a javelin 50 metres”, she answered chilling him.
In the 1960s, the Zátopeks retired from competitive sports. They were national heroes, revered as legendary athletes throughout the Czechoslovak Republic. In 1968, the attempt to humanise socialism made by reformist leader Alexander Dubček attracted many Czechs and Slovaks, including Dana and Emil, who had meanwhile become a coach in the Czech army with the rank of colonel.
They both signed Dubček’s “Two Thousand Words Manifesto”, a programmatic statement of the movement’s goals. Emil was one of those who led and incited the crowd in Wenceslas Square protests. The national euphoria came to an abrupt end when Soviet-led troops invaded Czechoslovakia to “restore socialism”, starting a new period of severe repression. The Zátopeks paid dearly for their activism.
A month later, in September, Emil went to Mexico City as the guest of honour at the Olympics. He said to Candido Cannavò, the correspondent of La Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper: “We lost, but the way our attempt was crushed belongs to barbarism. I am not afraid, though: I am Zátopek, they will not dare touch me...”.
And if it is true that no one will physically touch him, Emil and Dana will be punished with civil death. First, Czechoslovak MP Vilem Nový accused the opposition of having tricked Jan Palach into setting himself on fire. And he named Zátopek as one of the moral assassins of the young man. Allegations led nowhere, but were the beginning of a very painful psychological violence.
Emil was stripped of his rank, was expelled from the Communist Party and lost his job. Notwithstanding his 18 world records. He was sent to Jachymov, on the German border, to break his back in uranium mines. He spent six years there before going back to Prague and work as a garbage collector.
Dana had his salary cut. First she received a letter of dismissal from the association where she worked as a head coach. “What about all I have done for sport and the Republic? Wouldn’t you be ashamed to sack me?”, she replied during a hearing. In the end it was decided that the salary cut was humiliating enough.
Communist newspapers dropped an unnatural oblivion on them. They only managed to get by thanks to their love for each other and their own beliefs.
The Olympic joys were kept by Dana in a drawer: photos and recognitions of Emil’s records in the middle distance, 38 consecutive victories in the 10,000 metres, the first Olympic medals in London, Emil’s hat-trick in Helsinki in parallel with Dana’s gold medal, up to the last Olympic Games in Melbourne, run by Emil immediately after a hernia came out because he was training carrying Dana on his shoulders. These were all memories that made them go down in history: her elegance, his clumsiness but also his effectiveness, and it is no coincidence that he was called “Locomotive Man”, because he was always puffing. In all pictures he seems to be on the verge of collapse. But in the end he won.
They both retired in 1980, abandoned by the State, stripped of their Olympic prestige and living in oblivion. And when the communist regime fell in 1989, the couple’s fragile health conditions made it impossible for them to take part in the public life of the fledgling democracy.
One afternoon, just after the Velvet Revolution, someone recognised Emil on the esplanade in Letna, near Sparta Prague stadium. He was one of the five hundred thousand who had come down to celebrate that new freedom. They asked him to come on stage and speak to the crowd, as if it were still 1968. He refused: it was up to a new generation to take up the legacy of his struggles.
After Emil’s death, Dana moved into a small two-room apartment. Among the objects she brought to her new home was a broom. A worn and seemingly normal object, having though an incredible story. Years earlier, Emil had decided to replace the broom at home. So he had taken the javelin his wife had used to win in Helsinki and made it into a perfect broomstick. In those difficult years, decontextualising objects of their sporting glory and using them in everyday life (another winning javelin served as a coat rack) was a little hobby they had started to endure injustice.
Dana Zátopková never revoked her signature on the revolutionary document that marked her and her husband’s life forever. And she decided to use fairness and fair play at the basis of all her activities. “Everything must be done to ensure that fair play is maintained in any sporting activity. If money takes over, mischief will come in”, she used to say. She was a member of IOC until she was ninety.
Today they rest together, as they did once after running through a snowy forest. “We ran twenty kilometres in the snowy woods”, Dana told Sports Illustrated in 1990 (the interview was reported by Marco Patucchi in ‘Maratoneti, storie di corse e di corridori’, Baldini&Castoldi). “Halfway through I collapsed on the ground exhausted: ‘You go ahead, let me die here...’ I said jokingly to Emil. But he took a rope and tied me to his sides. So he ran all the way home, dragging me through the snow. At the end of that day, when we got home, he told me he felt tired. Once in a while...”.
[Our thanks go to Milan Czech Centre for advice during the writing of this article].
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