Michal Klasa

“When I was in Montreal at the world championships for the first time, that was in 1974, so shortly after Sixty-Eight, we were visited by an enormous amount of them boys (emigrants). They were doing well, but they were all, or at least ninety-five per cent of them, were frustrated by the fact they were banned from coming back here. They always told us: ‘Perhaps we wouldn’t even return, but the fact that we’re not allowed to is gripping us terribly.’ And it’d grip me too, I wouldn’t be able to endure it.”

“I’m sure that doping existed, that the East Germans had huge laboratories, that they had almost a hundred doctors who focused solely on cycling. Docent Chundela, head of the doping laboratory, said that they had something somewhere, but that he didn’t know what. Just as it is now, the substances were kept several years, to allow them to retrospectively find out what they don’t yet know. So I don’t know if anyone was ‘on’ something, but the doping tests were pretty strict, and we certainly didn’t have the chemicals necessary to do something like that. It was a time when the non-doping era had ended, regular doping tests had begun, but doping hadn’t developed to the extent it did, say, in 1988 and later. I don’t know if anyone was using something, certainly none of our cyclists had anything.”

“My wife’s mother has a sister who emigrated to Switzerland and married a hockey player who had been locked up in the Fifties, he’d worked in the uranium mines for five years; and Mr Kazlepka from counter-intelligence phoned me once and said: ‘But there’s something the matter over in Switzerland.’ ‘What’s in Switzerland?’ Well, you, your wife...’ I said: ‘Look. My mother-in-law has a sister, I’ve never seen her my whole life, we don’t correspond, I don’t know her, what do you want of me?’ So he left me be. If he knew that in 1983, when the the world championships were in Switzerland, I had slept in her house, I guess he wouldn’t have liked it. Pavel Doležel let me go there at the time, things like that happened, but only as long as no one found out.”