Věra Čáslavská

Věra Čáslavská
Čáslavská 1967
Personal information
Nationality:	Czech Republic
discipline	Apparatus gymnastics
Birthday:	May 3, 1942
Place of birth:	Prague
Death day:	August 30, 2016
Place of death:	Prague
Size:	160 cm
Medal table
Olympic games 7 × 4 × 0 × World championships 4 × 5 × 1 × European championships 11 × 1 × 1 ×
Medals
Olympic games silver Rome 1960 Team all-around gold Tokyo 1964 Individual all-around gold Tokyo 1964 Balance beam gold Tokyo 1964 Leap silver Tokyo 1964 Team all-around gold Mexico City 1968 Individual all-around gold Mexico City 1968 ground gold Mexico City 1968 Leap gold Mexico City 1968 Uneven bars silver Mexico City 1968 Balance beam silver Mexico City 1968 Team all-around  World championships silver Moscow 1958 Team all-around gold Prague 1962 Leap silver Prague 1962 Individual all-around silver Prague 1962 Team all-around bronze Prague 1962 ground gold Dortmund 1966 Individual all-around gold Dortmund 1966 Leap gold Dortmund 1966 Team all-around silver Dortmund 1966 bar silver Dortmund 1966 ground  European championships gold Krakow 1959 Balance beam silver Krakow 1959 Leap bronze Leipzig 1961 Individual all-around gold Sofia 1965 Individual all-around gold Sofia 1965 Leap gold Sofia 1965 Balance beam gold Sofia 1965 Uneven bars gold Sofia 1965 Horizontal bar gold Amsterdam 1967 Individual all-around gold Amsterdam 1967 Uneven bars gold Amsterdam 1967 ground gold Amsterdam 1967 Balance beam gold Amsterdam 1967 Leap

Věra Čáslavská (born May 3, 1942 in Prague ; † August 30, 2016 there ) was a Czechoslovak artistic gymnast . She is (as of 2016) with seven gold medals in fourth place among the most successful Olympic participants behind Larissa Latynina (9 × gold), Birgit Fischer and Jenny Thompson (8 × gold each), but won individual gold more often than them.

Athletic career

Věra Čáslavská started out as a figure skater before she got into gymnastics. She began her gold medal collection with three awards at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo and continued it in October 1968 at the Olympic Games in Mexico City , where she won four gold medals (horse jump, uneven bars, floor [together with Larissa Petrik ] and eight-fight singles) and won two silver medals (beam and eight combat team).

In 1968 she was voted “World Sportswoman of the Year”. In total, she won 22 international titles.

Political commitment

Almost four months before the Games in Mexico, she had the courage to sign the 2000 Words Manifesto . Therefore, after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia , she had to go into hiding for a few weeks. She continued training in a forest, the moss was her mat, felled trees were her balance beam. In view of her fame and the hope for medals, she was allowed to travel to the Olympic Games in Mexico. She dedicated each and every one of the medals won there to a hero of the Prague Spring , including Alexander Dubček . Věra Čáslavská was named Woman of the Year 1968 alongside Jacqueline Kennedy before she disappeared into the shadow of the Iron Curtain .

After she retired from active sport, for signing the 2000 Words Manifesto , she received none of the usual jobs for deserving citizens of her country. She was not allowed to leave the country and for a long time was considered a persona non grata . Věra Čáslavská, unlike other well-known personalities of the republic, did not revoke her signature and was only allowed to leave for Mexico in 1979, where she worked as a trainer. She returned when her brother died in custody at the age of 33.

After the fall of communism in November 1989, she was rehabilitated . From 1990 to 1992 she was an advisor to President Václav Havel and President of the Czech-Japanese Society. In 1996 she was elected President of the National Olympic Committee .

Private life

Shortly after the end of the Games, she married the athlete Josef Odložil , the winner of the Olympic silver medal in the 1500 m in 1964 in Mexico City . The marriage was divorced in 1987.

A tragic incident on August 6, 1993 threw her mentally off track: that night, her former husband Josef wanted to reprimand their son Martin, who had gotten into a fight. The two clashed. Josef Odložil suffered a serious head injury after a shock from Martin, from which he died after a five-week coma. After three years in prison, Martin was released on pardon.

Věra Čáslavská last lived with her daughter on the outskirts of Prague. She was inducted into the International Women's Sports Hall of Fame in 1991 and the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 1998.

In mid-2015, Čáslavská informed the Czech Olympic Committee that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She died in late August 2016 at the age of 74 years at the cancer . Věra Čáslavská rests in the cemetery of Černošice , Okres Praha-západ , south of the center of Prague.

literature

• When gymnastics was still female - Věra Čáslavská . In: Bettina Schumann-Jung: Women athletes write history. 25 portraits of extraordinary women . Arete Verlag Hildesheim 2017. ISBN 978-3-942468-88-6 .
• Josef Bartoš, Stanislava Kovářová, Miloš Trapl: Osobnosti českých dějin. Alda, Olomouc 1995, ISBN 80-85600-39-0 ; therein the chapter Čáslavská Věra, p. 46 (Czech).
• Peter Matthews, Ian Buchanan, Bill Mallon: The Guinness International Who's Who of Sport. Enfield 1993, ISBN 0-85112-980-3 .

Web links

Commons : Věra Čáslavská  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Věra Čáslavská in the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame (English)
• Věra Čáslavská in the database of the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (English)
• Věra Čáslavská in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Individual evidence

1. ^ The sun in persona , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 23, 2018, p. 27.
2. ↑ Roland Zorn: gymnastics icon, freedom fighter. Always upright. On the death of Vera Caslavska. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. September 2, 2016, p. 27.
3. ↑ International Women's Sports Hall of Fame: Hall of Fame Members. In: WomensSportsFoundation.org. 2011, accessed on August 31, 2016.
4. ↑ Olympic gymnastics champion Caslavska cancer. In: rp-online.de. May 14, 2016.
5. ↑ World athlete, political activist, gymnastics legend: Věra Čáslavská died at the age of 74. In: derstandard.at. August 31, 2016.
6. ^ The grave of Věra Čáslavská. In: knerger.de. Klaus Nerger, accessed on September 5, 2018 .