Jan Nagy

“It was the end of the year and there was to be some competition, a championship. Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship Cup in Bohumín. I had influenza at that time. And during the meeting of the chairman of our sports club, who was the director of OPBH… this man, whom I would characterize in one sentence as a person who was not even able to do a forward roll, let alone a backward one, he was an antithesis to a sports talent. And this guy told me that if I did not participate in that competition, I could forget about Moscow (the Olympic Games in Moscow). The Olympics were to be held half a year later. And I would have certainly qualified for the Olympics, do you understand? Well, I have to admit that I always say what I think. I told him that he was simply the last person who should be giving me orders, and that he could stick all these Olympics up his arse. I went home, I sat at my desk and I wrote to Prague as a member of the national team that I was quitting. I wrote to the sports club that I was quitting for health reasons, and weightlifting was definitely over for me. (And was it really such a big problem? You had to take part in many other competitions like that, hadn’t you? Or what bothered you about it so much? What was the reason for not going to the Olympics?) The reason was that I was really recovering after the illness and I needed to get fit again and I did not consider it necessary to participate in that competition. And most of all, I got mad at the manner of acting of this nobody, who dared to say something like that – and to talk to me as if he was giving me orders. No way… I immediately showed him my claws!”

“This is what I liked: after I had written that letter to the headquarters and to Sokolov that I was quitting (that was at the end of the year – in November), then on 7th January I received an invitation to Prague from Dušek. He was a vice-chairman or something like that, a bighead in the Party’s hierarchy to put it simply. Apart from me, there were Šuranová, Moravec (cyclist), and about seven other people. They prepared lunch for us and they gave us a reward. It was the first and last time when I received some financial reward: seven thousand crowns. It did come handy for me... And they thanked us! And then, after I had left (emigrated to Germany), there was certain Václav Kaněra in the Sokolov region who signed this document… He was a melancholic old geezer, he has obviously already died many years ago. He signed that letter and he was absolutely only a small pawn, a director of the cultural centre in Sokolv. The documents stated in both Czech and German, so that I would be able to read it, that they were informing the (then German) sports club that they were interrupting all relations and contacts with them, because they (the German club) had provided a – they did not write an asylum, but they wrote that they extended a helping hand to this villain. They warned them that I was a person who had been withdrawn from the national team for disciplinary reasons. Literally it said that I had been withdrawn from the national team. Well, dammit, I had the letters which said that they had thanked me for representing our country, you know? Even now, I still hold some record, actually, and in spite of that they wrote this bullshit about me… They (the Germans) thus only laughed about it and they threw the document to the rubbish bin – it did not matter to them. It only showed what kind of people lived in our country.”