“When we did sports, we had a pretty one-sided view of things. We wanted to do sports, we didn’t care about what went on in society. We had everything we needed, we could travel, we had good pay, decent conditions... They paid all of our training camps. If you had a job, you got a refund for three weeks of training. You didn’t feel anything was amiss. The only thing amiss was that the grocer’s only had apples, cabbages, onions, and potatoes. Before crossing the borders home we’d always stop by in Freistadt and do some shopping, so we could at least show people at home what vegetables look like.”
“We had a team of 120 people for the Olympics in Lake Placid, forty of which were [ice] hockey players. We were accompanied by seventy functionaries - everyone wanted to go to the Olympics because it was something exotic, attractive. When in America they made trips to the Niagara Falls, and it didn’t even occur to them that they should be watching our efforts. They didn’t give a hoot about us. And our team actually placed fourth in the relay! We didn’t understand how it was possible.”
“We went to the Olympics knowing that we had it set exactly how many medals we were supposed to bring back. [Who set that?] The Skiing Union, the management. [What happened when you didn’t get the medals?] They dissolved us. At the Olympics in Innsbruck we placed 9th, 12th, 13th, and 17th as individuals, we were sixths in the relay. Those results were enough to have us pack our bags at the end of the season, we were supposed to continue our training in our clubs. At that point I said to myself: ‘This won’t do.’ And I decided to start a family. That year I gave birth to my first daughter Lucka.”
Gabriela Soukalová-Svobodová was born on 27 February 1953 in Kremnica. Towards the end of primary school she started to do competitive skiing. In her second year at a secondary school of electrotechnology in Liptovský Hrádek, she was accepted into the junior national sports team. Later, while still at a junior age, she was transferred to the adult national sports team. She won a silver medal at the world championships in Sarajevo (1974); she went on to represent Czechoslovakia at the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck (1976) and Lake Placid (1980). She ended her skiing career in 1985 and was subsequently employed as a trainer at the Jablonec club of the Ministry of the Interior. In 1987 she began teaching at the Jablonec sports grammar school, where she remains to this day. Her second daughter Gabriela Soukalová - Koukalová is a top-rated competitive skier.
