Vera Caslavska
The gymnast who dominated her sport until she was ostracised by the Czech government
VERA Caslavska, the Czech gymnast who died on Tuesday aged 74, dominated her sport in the 1960s when she became the only gymnast to have won Olympic gold medals in each individual event; her competitive career, however, came to an end over her public opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.
In all, Caslavska won 22 international titles between 1962 and 1968, with four world championships and 11 European championship titles in addition to the seven gold and three silver medals that she won at the 1964 Tokyo and 1968 Mexico Olympics.
A bouncy, smiling blonde, Caslavska was once described by a former coach as “like someone you’d take to the high school prom.”
She used her good looks to captivate crowds, and at the 1968 Mexico Olympics she became the darling of the host nation after selecting the Mexican Hat Dance as the music for her floor exercise. When, immediately after the games, she married her compatriot Josef Odlozil, the 1964 Olympic 1,500m silver medallist, in a Catholic ceremony in Mexico City, she was mobbed by thousands of supporters.
The same year she was runner-up to Jackie Kennedy in a poll of the world’s most popular women.
But Vera almost did not make it to the games. In April 1968, she had signed a declaration protesting at Soviet involvement in Czechoslovakia.
When the Red Army invaded in August, two months before the start of the games, she went into hiding in the forests where she maintained her fitness by lifting bags of coal, swinging from tree branches and even practising her floor routine in a field.
A last-minute change of heart by the Czech regime allowed her to join the rest of the team in time for the opening ceremony in October.
After all, they could hardly ignore an athlete who had single-handedly won Czechoslovakia three out of its five gold medals at the 1964 Olympics.
In Mexico she added golds for the combined exercises, vault and asymmetric bars, and was joint first in the floor exercises, besides collecting silver in the beam and team event. She and her teammates might have swept the board entirely, but unbeknownst to them, the Soviets had taken extreme measures to ensure their gymnasts were not thrashed by the Czech girls.
Doctors had discovered that pregnant women could gain an advantage in muscle power, suppleness and lung capacity, because they produced more red blood cells. In 1994 Olga Kovalenko, a gold medal winner at the 1968 Olympics, told an interviewer that all the members of the Soviet women’s gymnastic team had been forced to become pregnant before the Olympics: if they did not have a husband or boyfriend, they were made to have sex with a male coach.
Anyone who refused was thrown off the team. After 10 weeks of pregnancy every gymnast had an abortion. They won the team gold medal by a fraction of a point, with Czechoslovakia second. “In any other country it would have been called rape,” one of the Soviet coaches said later.
Meanwhile, when she went up to receive the gold medal for her floor exercises, the news was broadcast that the score of the Soviet Union’s Larisa Petrik had been upgraded and the two would share the title. When the Soviet Union’s national anthem was played, Caslavska stood with her head down and turned away in a silent but unmistakable protest.
On her return to Prague she gave her four gold medals to the leaders of the Prague Spring, who had been replaced by Soviet puppets. Retribution was swift. She was barred from travelling abroad and for years denied any coaching post.
Caslavska was born on May 3, 1942, in Prague, where her father ran a grocery business that was seized by the Communist government in 1948. Athletic as a child, she took up gymnastics when Eva Bosakova, then her country’s leading gymnast, appeared on television inviting girls to take part in a talent competition.
She made her first international appearance at the 1958 world championships in Moscow, where she helped the Czechs take second place in the team competition. She first participated at the Olympics in 1960, winning a silver.
After the 1968 Olympics it was seven years before Caslavska could shame the Czech sports ministry into giving her even the meanest of coaching jobs — in a small gymnastics club. She was allowed back to Mexico to coach the national gymnastic squad in the lead-up to the 1980 games, but on her return she was still forbidden to receive foreign visitors.
In 1985 Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, insisted on presenting an award to Caslavska and the great Czech runner Emil Zatopek, a co-signatory to the 1968 April declaration, who had also been ostracised by the communist regime.
When the regime crumbled in 1989 Caslavska was appointed president of the Czech National Olympic Committee.
But she suffered much sadness in her later years. Her marriage to Odlozil broke up in the 1990s and in 1993 Odlozil died from wounds inflicted by their son, Martin, during a fight in a Prague disco. After the incident Caslavska suffered from depression.
Vera Caslavska is survived by her son and by a daughter.