Vladek Lacina

„The question of doping is a very controversial one. It is again being re-opened today in relation to the successes of socialist athletes. Back then, experts as well as non-exerts like me considered rowing as a sports discipline not apt for doping. For rowing, one needs strength and stamina, with stamina being the more important part. The chemical labs back then were not able to manage that. Rowing was considered the inviolable sport. Nevertheless, we were at times offered unauthorized means to improve our performance, officially as well as non-officially. They said it would be under “medical assistance”, but we did not really know how the doctors controlled the process. For moral reasons, I and most of my colleagues refused it. I also had my own solution. My mother got to know an endocrinologist, whose daughter was a top-level athlete and was subject to some pressure to do doping, as well. This doctor had been taking my blood and sending it for examination every month for several years. Thus I could have been sure that my career was never to be compromised. In fact, because of the collective nourishment, we could have never been sure about not in-taking anabolics unconsciously. And this was the only one and in my opinion also an efficient way of preventing it.”

“1984 meant for me and a lot of athletes a crucial breach and an attack on the Olympic spirit. Nobody told us in advance there would be no Olympic Games for us. All the money and efforts of athletes, trainers and officials was being invested in the preparation. They started to address the issue only two months before departure. The more brutal it was. All the people who were motivated to the maximum and who gave all to the preparation suddenly found out one month before leaving that there were to be no Olympics for them, that they could not participate for reasons which are banal and apparently substitutive and that they had become a part of some political game. I and a number of my colleagues started to reflect for the first time on to what extent the representation of a socialist state is not only a private issue of an athlete. One had become a part of a bigger plan and a game which was not honest. I have never thought about this before. Of course I had been thinking about how could I possibly represent socialist Czechoslovakia when my father was imprisoned at uranium mines for ten years. But I thought of it as if my father had made up for me. That, in a way, by becoming a member of the social elite at that time, a top-level athlete and a national team member, I collected a debt the regime owed me. I don’t know if it was the right way to conceive it. Nevertheless, the Olympics in Los Angeles opened the eyes of many of those, who have not had such an experience before. “