Bohumil Janoušek

* 1937

  • "They didn't know how to pay me, I was the first professional rowing coach, the first ever. Not only was I a foreigner, no one before me had been professionally employed by the rowing association. They agreed to give me what the teachers of different categories take. They said, 'Now you're a coach, then you'll be a principal coach.' And the scale was three or four grades. I had two young kids and I had no capital. The main problem with being an expatriate is that you emigrate with no funds. And it's pretty tough. They didn't understand it either, they paid me monthly, but my expenses I had to pay and they reimbursed me. And I didn't have anything to pay them out of, so I supported the association for a month, and then they paid me back what I paid them for a month. There were times when I didn't even have enough money for a bus, it was such a tight use of revenue money for us that it was a bummer." - "Is that why you slept in the boathouse?" - "Yes, it was getting better that way. I'd say it was enough to live on, but not a luxury. Like when our fridge or washing machine broke down, that was a big problem, these investments where you had to find a hundred pounds. There wasn't a hundred pounds."

  • "We had a training camp again, that's when Slapy dam used. We used to go to Slapy, there was a track and many kilometres of water to ride on. There was a lot of rowing, I remember I had a blisters on my hands, that's one of the rowing specialties, you have calluses, under the calluses a blister, under the blister another callus. There were always beds at night when I was lying down and they had metal frames made of tubes. That was wonderful because I'd lie on my back like that and hold on to that pipe and it was beautifully cold and it cooled my hands and arms beautifully. It helped me madly and I fell asleep beautifully holding on to the tube. That was hilarity."

  • "It was very interesting, in my case it was the first Olympics. And usually it's the one you remember the most. It makes the biggest impression on you because it's the first one and you don't have anything before to compare it to. Rome had the advantage of being a little bit set in an ancient setting. All the sights were there, not that you had to go around and look for it. It was everywhere, the old Roman monuments. The race was set in quite an interesting environment. This was Albano, the lake, the flooded volcano. You'd drive up there and there'd be nothing. You were being driven there in a bus from the Olympic village, and now all of a sudden you'd drive into a tunnel, drive through, and everything would open up. And you were in a crater where there was a lake and there were high sides. Up there was Castel Gandolfo, where the Pope had his summer residence. And down below that was the lake."

  • "I had a top guy at the industrial school, Petr Kop, he was a great friend of mine and he played volleyball when he was young. He was very much into coaching. Because I was friends with him and sat at a school desk with him, we used to hang out after school. We used to go to the spa at Na Slupi, and there was steam and things like that. One of his practice drills was we did squat jumps in the steam, a hundred in one go, because volleyball players needed to jump. I used to go in there with him to hold the bunch, and I'd do a hundred squat jumps with him. Not in the gym, but in the steam room to make it even harder and more strenuous. Peter played very well after that, made the national team, and even did silver in Tokyo. The volleyball players made silver there and we 'only' made bronze, that's where we met."

  • "And my father used to go to work every day, he would go from his house in Zvoly down to Jarov and take the train to Branik, from Branik to the tram and to work. He worked the day, the tram, the train and up to the village. He kept himself in pretty good physical shape doing that every day. And that's where he fought on the barricades, that's where he was wounded. On his way home from work, instead of going home, he started fighting the Germans. It wasn't a very even fight, these guys were desperate and wanted to achieve something, but really the conditions were very difficult." - "Where was the barricade? Or barricades?" - "It was somewhere on the road to Branik, by the quarry. There's a quarry there and there was a barricade by the quarry. And on the other side, on the Štěchovice road, on the concrete road, there were tanks and they were shooting across the river at this barricade. And that's how he was wounded." - "Was he hit by shrapnel, or was it a gunshot, like a machine gun?" - "I don't know the details, we didn't discuss it. We were glad my dad survived. He was shot twice in the abdomen, which was a fatal wound at the time. They operated on him at the general hospital, so he eventually got over it."

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He won medals for England, but was not allowed home. Not even to his mum‘s funeral.

Bohumil Janoušek in 1971 in London during training of his charges on the Thames River
Bohumil Janoušek in 1971 in London during training of his charges on the Thames River
zdroj: archive of a witness

Bohumil Janoušek was born on 7 September 1937 in Prague. He grew up with his mother Anna, his father Bohumil and his brother four years younger. His father was severely wounded at the barricade in Braník in May 1945, he was shot twice in the abdomen, which he survived with great luck. Bohumil Janoušek got into boats thanks to the scout club, after its dissolution he was in the yacht club, from where he moved to the rowing club. He graduated from the Mechanical Engineering School in Prague and in 1956 joined the Institute of Physical Education and Sport at Charles University. In 1959 he made the Czechoslovak national team and won a silver medal at the European Championships with the eight-man rowing team. At the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome he won a bronze medal with the eight-man rowing team, and he also took third place in the same boat at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In 1967 he became the national coach. At the 1968 Summer Olympics, the Czechoslovak eight-man rowing team won fifth place. They failed to win a medal because they were missing a competitor who was eliminated due to kidney failure after a race. In the autumn of 1969, the Pragosport foreign trade company sent Bohumil Janoušek to Great Britain for a year‘s coaching engagement. Bohumil Janoušek did not return to his homeland and stayed in London with his wife and two young daughters. As an emigrant, he was unable to travel to Czechoslovakia in 1976 for his mother‘s funeral. Great Britain won two silver medals at the 1974 World Rowing Championships under his leadership, and repeated the same success at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Canada. Bohumil Janoušek quit coaching the British national team in the same year and worked in a boat manufacturing company until 1981. He then set up his own workshop where he made rowing boats. At its peak it had twenty-five employees and made six boats a week. He revisited his native country in 1991, but has remained in the UK permanently. In 2023 he was living there with his wife, two daughters and four grandchildren.