Emil Runner

Emil Zátopek (1922-2000), the greatest Czech athlete of all time. Holder of four gold and one silver Olympic medal. In London (1948) he won the 10,000 metres and finished second in the half distance. He even achieved a gold medal hat-trick in Helsinki (1952): No other athlete has won the 5,000 and 10,000 metres and the marathon since then. Three times European champion, fifteen times Czechoslovak champion. He broke 61 Czechoslovak and 18 world records. Best athlete in the world in 1949 and 1952.

"Emil Zátopek was at his peak in the 1940s and 1950s, during the Nazis and early Communists: in the worst times our country has seen in the 20th century. But he managed to build a life story on the circumstances that still fascinates the world today. He has achieved phenomenal success, but even more interesting than his records is the path he has taken to get there. He was by nature a hard worker, an ordinary man. He invented his method of interval training, which rewrote the history of athletics, from A to Z, like Edison invented the light bulb. Even as the world's number one runner he was not a performance junkie, he ran for joy and infected millions of people with that joy. At the same time, they wrote about a man whose training doses (a marathon a day) no one else could survive: "He runs like us. " And there was no contradiction: The sincerity with which he fought himself and his rivals was perceived by people as a general parable of human destiny. He was not as successful in all of life's battles as he was on the racetrack. He did not win his greatest struggle with the communist regime, which he started in 1968. But even losses belong to human stories, including the story of the phenomenal Emil Zátopek. " Pavel Kosatík

Radio recording from 2016