Bohumila Řešátková

"We felt it very strongly. At the time the 'allied troops' came in, we were at a pre-Olympic training camp. We always had two months of training, two phases, before the Olympics and the World Championships. They woke us up at night [and told us] that the tanks were in Šumperk, we thought they were joking, that it was a military exercise. We weren't allowed to go out much, Věra went out to see, which I only found out later from the documentaries. We were locked up in the gym, we listened to the news, we had transistor radios by our equipment, we listened to everything. We didn't know what was going to happen to the nation, to the Olympics. Then came the news that Věra, as she had signed the Two Thousand Words, that she was in danger of going to prison. I'm sure the listeners know the story, so she went to the mountains. And there wasn't much talk about that, Jana Kubičková was with her, they did some of the preparation in the forest. In the end, it turned out that we were going to the Olympics. They invited us to the Castle, the whole Czechoslovak Olympic team, so it was a great experience for me, we met all the leaders, President Svoboda, Mr. Smrkovský, Dubček, Černík. We gave them flowers, they encouraged us. They told us what was going on, but very, I would say, carefully, in case somebody was recording it. It strengthened us a lot, as gymnasts we were leaving being determined and we wanted to beat the Soviet women again."

"I´ll start [talking about] the twelve-year school, I used to get up most mornings at six, I learned everything quickly so that I would keep it in my mind. At school I used to study during breaks, and before school. Then, to make it to training session, at the ten-minute break, the second to last or last one, I'd run down from the third floor for lunch, eat lunch, and go back upstairs. I got home, swapped my bag. It was a tram Nr. 3 ride to the sports hall to training session, hopping on and off the tram. Four hours of training, every day, a massage twice a week, so it was even longer. Then back, dinner at home and I went to bed. As for the University of Chemical Technology, I studied it in the evenings after a year of full-time study, so there were lectures twice a week from two to late evening. When I started at university, Mr. Tráva, the head of the PE department, called me in and said, 'If you don't study four hours a day, you're not going to finish the study.' 'Well, okay, I said, 'Oh dear, and when I am going to do it?! So during every tram ride...I just studied four hours a day, I don't know how I did it."