Jan Smolík

“Czechoslovak cyclists were rated according to the Peace Race. They didn’t care about the world championship or the Olympics. If you got a good result in the Peace Race, everything was okay and you could participate in races all around the world. But if you placed badly, everything was bad: the cyclist was blacklisted, he stopped going abroad, he had no funding.”

“In 1961 I started my military service as a conscript at Dukla, and I stayed there until 1975. It was very difficult to get into Dukla at the time because they only took two or three cyclists from the whole of Czechoslovakia. There was always a lot of competition for those three places. I was originally supposed to join Dukla Pardubice, but I’d caught the eye of Mr Jursa, the trainer at Dukla Brno, and he had me switched to his detachment.”

“We lived in the barracks as ordinary soldiers, we had breakfast, lunch, dinner with the soldiers, we ate the same they did. When we came back from breakfast we took off our uniforms, dressed up in cycling gear and set off for our training session. When we finished training we came back, changed into our uniforms, went for lunch. After lunch we took off our uniforms again and dressed in our cycling gear and went to get more practice. And thus it was day by day.”