Dana Zatopkova
Olympic javelin champion whose love affair with Emil Zatopek enthralled the sporting world
DANA ZATOPKOVA, who has died in Prague aged 97, was a Czechoslovak javelin-thrower who won two Olympic medals but was best known as wife of the runner Emil Zatopek, with whom she shared a birthday – and, many felt, one of the great Olympic love stories.
Her finest Olympic moment came on July 24 1952 in Helsinki. Her husband had just won gold in the 5,000 metres. Dana, who had been warming up for her own event, learnt of his victory as she was emerging into the arena. She hugged him, snatched his medal and put it in her bag for luck.
The women’s javelin final began minutes later: she broke the Olympic record with an opening throw of 50.47 metres.
A nail-biting contest failed to produce a better distance, and when Dana Zatopkova realised that she had beaten the Soviet favourites to become Olympic champion she performed a cartwheel of delight.
The official report of the Helsinki Organising Committee declared her “the happiest gold medallist” of the Games.
Her husband later had the temerity to suggest that she had been “inspired” by his 5,000m victory. “All right then,” she responded, “go and inspire some other girl to throw 50 metres.” Such banter was typical of their relationship, and delighted the public.
They were the first, and for many years the only, married couple to win Olympic gold on the same day. They had been born on the same day (“We could get married on the same day too,” suggested Emil brightly, when they first learnt of the coincidence).
Their trackside kiss following Emil’s victory in the 1952 Olympic marathon became one of the best-known photographs of the decade.
Their love story had begun four years earlier, when they travelled to London for the first Olympics after the Second World War. Dana Ingrova, as she then was, left without medals but with a pair of gold wedding rings purchased by Zatopek (who won gold and silver) in Piccadilly.
The couple caused a minor scandal when Zatopek, an Army officer, travelled at dawn from the Uxbridge barracks where the Czechoslovak men were staying to the girls’ school in Northwood where the women were housed, to show Dana his latest medal.
He lured her from her dormitory by whistling their favourite Moravian folk song, and they sat together by the school swimming-pool, whispering.
Dana, trying to extract the medal from its box, dropped it in the pool. Zatopek stripped and retrieved it. He was just getting dressed when the school’s headmistress appeared, convinced that she had caught them in flagrante. “We were so embarrassed,” Dana would explain laughingly, “but we hadn’t done anything.”
Their romance continued – notwithstanding a partial separation forced on them by the anti-liberal backlash that followed the 1968 Prague Spring – until Zatopek’s death in 2000. By then, Dana Zatopkova was recognised as an exceptional athlete in her own right.
She set a world record at 35 – the oldest woman to do so in an outdoor athletics event – and won Olympic silver in Rome a few weeks before her 38th birthday. It would be 40 years before she lost her record as the oldest woman to win an Olympic track and field medal.
Dana Helena Marie Ingrova was born in Frystat, in the Moraviansilesian region of what was then Czechoslovakia, on September 19 1922. She and her two brothers grew up in Olomouc and then, from 1933, in
Uherske Hradiste, where their father, Colonel Antonin Ingr, commanded the 27th Infantry Regiment. At school she showed promise as a handball player; the Nazi invasion disrupted that enthusiasm. She spent the war years as an office-worker at Uherske Hradiste’s railway station and belonged to a resistance organisation, Vela, although there is no evidence that she was active.
The Nazis were more interested in her father, who was associated with the democratic pre-war government of Edvard Benes. Colonel Ingr was twice arrested by the Gestapo and spent much of the war in Spilberk, Dachau and Buchenwald. His daughter was scarred by his ordeals and in later life was terrified that a similar fate would befall her outspoken husband under the Communist regime that seized power in Czechoslovakia in 1948.
After the war she studied physical education at Brno University of Technology. She did not complete her studies but did discover javelinthrowing. By 1948 she was working as a nursery teacher in Zlin, where, a month before the Olympics, she met her future husband at an athletics meeting.
Each had set a new national record, and they were instructed to present the other with a congratulatory bouquet. By the end of the second exchange Emil was smitten, and by the time the pair flew to London the following month – Dana having scraped the qualifying distance at the last minute – the feeling was mutual.
She married Zatopek on October 24 1948, despite the doubts of her own family (Zatopek was from a humbler background) and the objections of Zatopek’s Communist superiors in the Army, who were suspicious of the Ingr family’s links with social democracy. The crowds of well-wishers were so dense that Dana could barely get into the church. Bride and groom carried traces of injuries sustained earlier that day when they had attempted to kiss while riding bicycles.
The newly-weds set up home in Prague – she found a job as a secretary with a sports magazine – and their flat became a magnet for fellow athletes and athletics enthusiasts. Gordon Pirie, one of Zatopek’s English rivals at 10,000 metres, described it as “the gayest and merriest home I ever visited”.
She was sixth in the world rankings in 1949, fifth in 1950 and fourth in 1951. Finally, in 1952, she had her reward in Helsinki.
Back in Czechoslovakia, the Zatopeks’ lives became a constant round of public appearances and private pestering. Somehow they found the self-discipline to keep training but from the mid-1950s Zatopek’s career began to decline; his last race was in January 1958.
Dana proved more durable. She won gold in the European Championships in Bern in 1954 and was ranked first in the world the following year. In 1958 she set a world record (55.73m), won European gold again, in Stockholm, and then a month later threw a career-best 56.67m. In 1960 she won Olympic silver in Rome. She retired as a competitor in 1962 but for the next half-century was a coach and mentor for young athletes. Although Dana Zatopkova underwent repeated treatments for infertility, the couple never had children of their own.
The marriage suffered from the resulting tensions, and both took other lovers. But they remained devoted to one another, and from 1961 they put their energies into building a house on a patch of wasteland in the Prague suburb of Troja.
The Prague Spring of 1968 saw a change in their fortunes. Enthusiastic supporters of Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face”, the Zatopeks both signed the pro-reform manifesto known as The Two Thousand Words.
A Soviet-led invasion followed, the Prague Spring was crushed, and Zatopek was expelled from the army, stripped of his role in sport and forced to spend years working as an itinerant labourer far from Prague.
Dana Zatopkova, alone in Prague, found herself no longer the soughtafter figure she had once been, although she was allowed to continue her coaching work.
Later she found that her pension had been halved as a punishment. She had been coaching young athletes since 1953 and formally retired from the role in 1980, though she continued to act as a mentor and adviser.
Zatopek’s health declined after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and Dana Zatopkova cared for him until his death in November 2000. She went on to establish a permanent Emil and Dana Zatopek exhibit in the Tatra Museum in Koprivnice, Zatopek’s birthplace, and founded an annual race in his memory, a half-marathon run from there to his final resting place, in Roznove pod Radhostem.
She also spent time updating and expanding the joint memoir that she and Emil had published (with Party approval) in 1960. The resulting book was published in 2016.
Her contributions to the Olympic movement earned her honours ranging from the Olympic Order to the Unesco Prix du Fair Play.
Dana Zatopkova, born September 19 1922, died March 13 2020
After their support for the Prague Spring of 1968, the couple were forced to live apart for several years