"Sport has also taught me, I would say, not to exaggerate success and to manage it. But equally, sport has taught me to handle failure, to learn from it and to do more next time to be better and to be more successful. And not to oversell the sport, there is a lot of visible success, but it's not the navel of the world. It's terribly important that sport teaches you a lot. Above all, the journey to success and to achievement is very instructive, whether you are successful or not, it is on that journey that you learn as much as you can about yourself. And I think it's good to be aware of what's going on around you and how you are perceived by your surroundings. So sport has given me a lot, it's allowed me to travel. I went from Zálesní Lhota to the end of the world. If someone asked me if sport took anything away from me, I think it was the minimum. But the most important thing is that it has taken away the illusion that someone truly wishes you success."
"So I was third overall. But I remember I cried at the finish because the stress just came off me. I wasn't happy at all, I didn't feel tired at all, just the stress came off me. I think it was so unnecessary and insensitive that if I could have focused on the race, I could have done much better. And I can't completely forgive the management for that. Although of course I have long since forgiven, it doesn't matter today. But it's a terrible shame, because there was a relay two days later and we just took the stress off of ourselves with my medal. I went into the relay so calm and so relaxed that I woke up in the morning and felt like no one was going to beat me today. I had the best time in that race. So if I could have gone into the five like that, it might have gone a little differently. Although Hämäläinen was so good that she probably would have won. But at least we could have had peace of mind."
"The hockey players should have brought a medal back then. At least that's what our officials had planned. But they allowed themselves to lose the very first game to the United States team. They should have been outsiders in the eyes of our officials. But they had no idea that they would win the whole Olympics, that they would be motivated, that they had selected the best players. And they're at home. So losing to the Americans was an absolute shock for the officials, plus they broke Martinecs' arm. That was our player who created the game, he was a great hockey player. On the second day the five went, so a bit surprisingly I finished absolutely close to the big favourite Barbara Petzold in third ahead of the ender. That was another shock for the officials, but there was no celebration, as there was today, when the medal is more or less taken as a great success in the expedition. Then too, but it was too soon. Dáša Palečková was thirteenth and Gaba Svobodová was twentieth. Comrade Himl didn't talk to them at all and didn't invite them anywhere. But he invited me and my coach to a room like this. I don't remember much, I only know that he gave us a Pilsner beer and we shared it. I don't even know what he said, maybe he thanked us, I don't know. It had such a content that not a word of it remains in my head."
"However, I know such pleasures as bullying very well.
How did bullying manifest itself back then in the sixties?
It's always in the individual person, I admit that I had a classmate who was so intelligent that he failed in the first grade. He bothered me quite a bit, unfortunately he lived quite close to us, I had two and a half kilometres to school. I had been walking since I was a little girl, and this classmate took the greatest pleasure in being able to take my hat, push me in the mud, take my sledge and throw it in the creek. He was a little simple in character as far as intelligence was concerned, so he had a rough and violent nature. He would lash out at me, which was very unpleasant. When I complained to his father, he went to his mother, and she said in no uncertain terms - No, our Jaroušek is good, he doesn't do anything. That settled it and I had no choice but to run away. Sometimes it happened to me that I ran from the school all the way home or halfway across the village. I would say it might have been the first training, but it was also stressful because it was strong and insidious. It was a situation I don't like to remember. But as they say, there is justice. This classmate really liked horses, he wanted to see ours. I didn't invite him of course, he was a bit cheeky and came to the cottage one fine day. He saw the stable door open, the horse's butt was almost at the door, he peeked in. He was eight or nine years old, I don't know what he did, if he pulled the horse's tail. I preferred not to look, I just saw from the front door that he was coming in and I preferred to back out. In a moment I saw the little ball roll out of the stall. The horse just kicked him out, so he got his revenge for me."
"Personally, I had a hard time enduring such, I would say, sometimes propaganda moments. Maybe we went to the Olympics, so they told us, 'You have to behave... You can't associate with Western opponents.' Or rather, I think they were secretly watching us if we made any contacts. It was like that, but I would say, it depended a lot… I never really realized it, but of course they definitely watched over us. From this point of view, I think that there were probably some informants among the coaches who gave reports about how we behave, what we do, what we don't do. But we mainly cared about the sports result and we perceived this only very marginally or rather only in retrospect we found out which of those coaches reported on us."
"In 1969, which is now 50 years ago, it happened that my father went to the field, had a heart attack and never returned from the field. It was a really difficult moment for us; literally a shock to her mother, because she suddenly didn't know what to do, how to do it. Of course, neither of us did, because the barn was full of cattle, there was a horse in the stable, but there was no farmer. Then suddenly there was a time when my mother had to solve all this in some way. So she finally joined the collective farm, because there was nothing else left for her to do. They took the fields from us, took the cows away and paid us about as much money as they did in the 1950s, so we got about three thousand for four cows, which was a bit of money at the time, but given what we had to pay for them before, it was just pittance."
"We were a bit like black sheep in that village, because we were the only ones who didn't join the association. I don't know if this was the reason, but it definitely played a certain part, so for example we - as girls - were often the target of some bullying by boys, for example, that they hurt us, or attacked us physically in some way. It was quite an unpleasant experience. These are things I've never talked about much. It was only in adulthood that we realized that we might have complained to a teacher or someone. But even if I complained to her, I know it would turn out that when I left school, the boy I was complaining about pushed me in the mud somewhere, or give me a few slaps or steal my hat or sled and shove it in the creek because it was common practice. So, these are experiences that I don't like to remember, but they simply belonged to that childhood and the village spirit."
Květa Jeriová, née Pecková, was born on 10th October 1956 in Jilemnice into a family of private farmers farming in Zálesní Lhota. Her father was the only one from the village who was not in a unified agricultural cooperative. From an early age she helped her parents and because of the lack of free time she refused offers to become a member of the ski club in nearby Studenec. It was only after her father‘s death and her mother‘s joining the JZD (unified agricultural cooperative) that she started skiing competitively in 1970. In 1972 she made it to the junior national team. Between 1974 and 1984 she was a member of the Czechoslovak national cross-country skiing team. She won two bronze and one silver medal at the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games in Lake Placid and Sarajevo. She won a bronze medal at the 1982 World Championships in Norway. She graduated from the Faculty of Education in Hradec Kralove and was a physical education and geography teacher for twenty years. She met her future husband, rower Zdeněk Pecka, through an interview for the magazine Stadion. They raised two daughters together. In 2021 she lived in Litoměřice and worked for the Czech Olympic Committee.
