Olga Fikotová Connolly, discus champ in famed Olympic romance, dies at 91

She was a discus thrower from Czechoslovakia. He was a hammer thrower from the United States. Together, Olga Fikotová and Harold “Hal” Connolly were a storybook couple, taking some of the chill out of the Cold War when they fell in love and each won a gold medal at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia.

When they married in Prague months later, overcoming communist red tape and criticism from government officials who deemed her a traitor, some 30,000 well-wishers and curiosity seekers filled historic Old Town Square, straining to catch a glimpse of the couple before they left for the United States. “Love Triumphs Over Ideology,” Life magazine declared in a headline.

“Fate,” Ms. Connolly later told the Financial Times, “used Harold and I to illustrate that we can all choose whether to quarrel or be happy together.”

The marriage didn’t last — Ms. Connolly and her husband separated after 16 years, finalizing their divorce in 1974 — but she built a new life for herself in the United States, embracing activist causes as a feminist and environmentalist even as she continued setting discus records. She competed in four more Olympics, all as an American, and was elected flag bearer by her fellow athletes for the 1972 Opening Ceremonies in Munich, becoming the rare Olympian to win gold for one country and carry the flag for another.

“The Olympic experience in every respect opened the world for me,” said Ms. Connolly, who died April 12 at 91. “It made me what I am.”

Her gold medal-winning victory in the Olympics was all the more remarkable given that she was still a relative novice in her sport — she had thrown the discus for less than two years before arriving in Melbourne at age 24 — and had an uneasy relationship with Czechoslovak authorities, even before she fell in love with someone from across the Iron Curtain.

Growing up, she recalled, she had been kicked out of school because she was from a “reactionary family.” In Melbourne, she was reportedly the only member of her country’s team who had declined membership in the Communist Party, risking retribution because of her Protestant religious beliefs.

It was partly her independent streak that had captivated her future husband at the Olympics. “I fascinated Harold,” she told an interviewer in 2015, “because he never could imagine a communist — which I was not — being so free.”

An only child, Olga Fikotová was born in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia and now the Czech Republic, on Nov. 13, 1932. Her father served in the security detail for Tomáš Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia; according to the family, he was persecuted during the Nazi occupation and was sent to prison for two years after the communists came to power in 1948.

During that time, Ms. Connolly and her mother moved to a small town outside Prague, where her mother worked in the coal mines.

Ms. Connolly set out to become an orthopedic surgeon and was studying medicine at Charles University in Prague in 1954 when she began throwing the discus with encouragement from coach Otakar Jandera, a former Olympic hurdler. He introduced her to the fundamentals of the sport while playing “The Blue Danube” on a loop over the loudspeakers, teaching her how to spin in time to the waltz.

The next year, she had her breakthrough at an international track meet in Poland. She finished 28th out of 28 throwers but was approached during a workout the next day by Nina Ponomareva, a champion discus thrower who had earned the Soviet Union its first Olympic gold medal. Taking pity on Ms. Connolly, she offered tips on her technique and instructed the young Czech athlete to bulk up.

“She told me that if I followed her advice, she would see me the next year in Melbourne,” Ms. Connolly recalled. Ponomareva was right: The next year, Ms. Connolly won the gold medal after setting what was then a women’s Olympic record, with a throw of nearly 176 feet 2 inches. Ponomareva, the reigning Olympic champion, came in third. “She was mad as hell,” Ms. Connolly said.

Ms. Connolly had planned to return to Prague to complete her medical degree after the Games. But soon after her arrival in Melbourne, she met Harold, the first American to win gold in the hammer throw since Fred Tootell in 1924. The athletes almost literally bumped into one another, Ms. Connolly recalled, striking up a conversation after she accidentally collided with another American while bounding out of the equipment trailer.

Speaking broken English and German, they developed a relationship over the objections of Czechoslovak delegation leaders, who walked away when Ms. Connolly tried to introduce them to her new American friend. Harold promised to come to Prague to marry her after the Games ended and arrived in the capital in early 1957 while visiting Europe as a goodwill ambassador for the State Department.

Ms. Connolly had returned home to a mixed reception. Some government representatives told her “that I was a traitor,” she said, “and that I was running around with an American fascist.”

Although Ms. Connolly said she had hoped to continue competing for Czechoslovakia after moving to the United States — her husband sold one of his hammers to finance their trip across the Atlantic — the country’s Olympic committee sent her a letter effectively disowning her. She gained U.S. citizenship and helped her parents move to Southern California, where she and her husband settled in 1959 and were welcomed as celebrities.

Appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the couple was serenaded by Louis Armstrong and introduced on-air by Sullivan as “one of the nicest love stories that ever came out of sports.”