A Runner,
A Hero

BY KATE CARTER

Every runner should have a hero. An inspirational grinder of miles, perhaps, or one of those wraith-like spirits who float above the ground, paying cursory lip service to gravity. My hero? He was once described as running “like a man wrestling with an octopus on a conveyor belt.” Elegance, grace, natural talent: none of these words has ever been used to describe Emil Zátopek.

But a true hero he undoubtedly was. For his grit, his epic-bordering-on-insane training sessions, for carrying his wife on his back through snowy forests, trampling laundry in the bath as a makeshift treadmill. Nothing, but nothing, got between Zátopek and training.

But for Czechs – and I am half Czech - he was far more than just an athlete. He had a legendary generosity of spirit: friends to everyone, he gave his bed to visiting strangers, was the idol of fellow runners, supporters, and – at a crisis point in history – a voice who stood up for his country in the face of brutal oppression.

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Czechs are Central Europeans. My grandmother - who lived in London for the vast majority of her 92 years - would get furious when people described her as Eastern European. Firstly, “I’m from London, anyway!” she would say in a heavily distinctive Czech accent. Secondly, “Prague is further west than Vienna!”.

To grow up in Czechoslovakia in the early to middle part of the 20th century was to be at the heart of Europe. Just about everyone was, at the very least, bilingual. My Grandfather had a good grasp of 11 languages. Emil Zátopek came from a poor background, left school at 14, but taught himself eight languages, and could get by in a few others. But this was unremarkable if you came from a tiny, Central European country with a tenuous grasp on existence for most of the 20th century. After all, who the hell was ever going to learn Czech?

My grandmother from a well-off Prague family, with servants and a grand house. My grandfather from a much more humble but very intellectual background. He was her maths tutor, hired to scrape her through her exams at school. She passed, they fell in love. They got married at the Old Town Hall in Prague - famous for its 14th century astronomical clock. They probably had plans for what came next, but it was 1939, and Czechoslovakia was swallowed by the German army.

Meanwhile in rural Moravia, the young Emil Zátopek was working in the Bata shoe factory in Zlin. Manual labour, a few days holiday a year, small town life. It was the factory who made him run: in the annual race through the streets of the town. He came second. Completely untrained, probably wearing leather shoes, but what a moment of freedom that must surely have seemed. Freedom from the sheer, relentless drudgery of factory work, from the oppression of Nazi occupation. A moment, surely, when a different path seemed to open up to him.

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Sport, too, saved my grandparents. In the Jewish memorial museum in Prague, there is a wall engraved with the name of every Czech Jew who died in the Holocaust. Amongst those names, most of my grandparents’s family; my family.

My grandfather, politically active, left-leaning, Jewish - saw what was coming. Somehow he got hold of some not very well forged identity papers. At the border, their train stopped at a railway hotel, scheduled to resume the next morning. During the evening, my grandad got talking with the hotel owner. It turned out they had a mutual love of sport and many heroes in common.

That night, Nazi soldiers came. My grandparents sat in their room at the end of the corridor, holding hands, as the knocks and shouts came nearer and nearer. Others were taken away. Nearer and nearer. Then ... nothing. They sat there, all night, frozen in terror. But in the morning when they crept downstairs: nothing. No one there, a cold fireplace, an almost empty train, waiting to leave for safety.

They never found out what happened, but their best guess was that the owner, feeling some kinship with this fellow sports fan, committed his own tiny act of rebellion, and said no, absolutely not, no one was in that room at the end of the corridor.

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My grandparents always had a supply of such stories - perhaps it’s a national characteristic. Certainly tales of Zátopek's running exploits are legion. Yet the story that really cemented his hero status for me,  took place long after his running days were over. He was still a national icon, in a country recuperating in a brief period of calm, stuck between two colossal storms.

On the 20th August 1968, just before midnight, Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. The Soviet response to the Prague Spring - a brief thaw in the cold hand of the Cold War - was brutal. Alexander Dubček - who had strived for “socialism with a human face” was arrested. But a population who had been shown a brief glimpse of a warmer political climate did not back down. Crowds took to Wenceslas Square in defiance, waving homemade signs. At the heart of them, standing on a pedestal, denouncing the invasion at the top of his powerful lungs, was Emil Zátopek.

This was no empty gesture. Zátopek spoke directly to the troops - in his self-taught Russian: Why are you here? What do you want? He moved from tank to tank, even tried to persuade an officer to call an ‘Olympic truce’. It was, of course, in vain. Dubček was forced to capitulate, yet Zátopek would not. He carried on denouncing the Soviet regime - calling them “the gangsters of the world”. It could only end badly.

He was lucky, really, to survive - saved, perhaps, by his great gift for friendship - dozens of fellow athletes and friends in the West wrote letter after letter to the regime, demanding he was not harmed. So, physically, he was not. Instead, his own Cold War got colder. He was frozen out of public life, expelled from his honorary roles and became a pariah. He ended up working for a mining company. The greatest athlete of his time doing back-breaking labour (again) for four and a half years, his name - in true Soviet-style- erased from textbooks. The labour can hardly have broken a man long inured to physical exertion. But the loss of friendships, the exile, for this warmest of men: that must have been awful. Eventually he was allowed to return home, but as a ‘traitor to the cause’.

His reputation was destroyed for good. Even after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, he never truly regained his hero status. By rights, he should have statues everywhere: a national holiday. Roads, squares, museums named after him. Instead, a fade to relative obscurity.

My grandparents, too, went back to Prague after the war, but with the ever-heavier hand of Russian ‘influence’ bearing down, they left again, this time for good. My grandfather never went back, though my grandmother managed several trips to rediscover cousins and friends once lost behind the iron curtain. In 2003, I got married in the Old Town Hall in Prague. My grandmother was there too. Perhaps a kind of closure – one that Zátopek was never really granted.

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They say you should never meet your heroes. Yet no one who ever met Zátopek came away disappointed. 

My favorite story about him comes from 1968. His friend, the Australian Ron Clarke – arguably the greatest runner never to win Olympic gold - had just collapsed from altitude sickness, and nearly died, at the Mexico City games. Demoralized, Clarke decided to visit Prague to chat things over with his old friend Emil. As he left, Zátopek handed him a small parcel, making little of it. Clarke didn’t remember to unwrap it until he was on the plane home again.

In it, an Olympic gold medal. Zátopek had won four, to him it seemed only right to give one away to a man he felt truly deserved it. What a generosity of spirit: unmatched, surely, by any other runner. What a hero.