The Czechs in a Nutshell

The first time ice hockey boosted the Czechs’ national pride internationally was in 1909, when their team won the European Championship. Naturally, the thirst for hockey victories didn’t weaken after Czechoslovakia was established. At the World Championship in Prague in 1938, for instance, on exactly the same day that Adolf Hitler threatened to crush Czechoslovakia with all conceivable means, the Czechoslovak team crushed Germany 3:0 in the fight for the bronze medal.

“Those hockey sticks can be transformed into rifles,” the popular poet and later Nobel Prize laureate Jaroslav Seifert (see: First Republic) exulted after the fantastic victory over the Germans. Well, they could not. But as Czechoslovakia suffered one devastating humiliation after the other in the arena of international politics, its triumphs in the arena of international ice hockey were at times the only source of national pride.

Ice hockey’s political impact became, according to Čechtický, even more evident under the communists. In 1949, the Czechoslovak national team won the World Championship for the second time. The next championship was scheduled in London, and the Czech and Slovak players prepared thoroughly to repeat the success. The communist regime, however, had other plans.

First, party bigwigs told the players they were not allowed to travel to capitalist Western Europe. Then secret police agents provoked the frustrated players, who in the classic Czech manner were drowning their sorrows in a hospoda, to start a fight. The hospoda brawl was subsequently used as a pretext to arrest the sportsmen. Shortly after, 11 members of the Czechoslovak national hockey team were sentenced to long prison terms on different fabricated charges.

It’s hard to say whether the rotten attack on the hockey heroes was initiated by the Czechoslovak communists or by their masters in Moscow.

In any case, it’s obvious that the Bolsheviks regarded the national hockey team’s enormous popularity as a political threat.

By an odd twist of fate, the national hockey team was once more to humiliate a detested occupant on the ice. In 1969, only half a year after the Soviet Union “brotherly” invaded the country, Czechoslovakia’s national team beat the Russian team 2:0 in the World Championship in Stockholm.

As expected, the victory was greeted with tremendous joy by millions of Czechs and Slovaks, who, on their television screens, noticed that several of the players had even pasted tape over the red star that disgraced the Czech lion on their shirts. In fair play, the apparently all-mighty Russians didn’t stand a chance against little Czechoslovakia! The spirit of the Prague Spring (see: Communism) was not crushed!

Paradoxically enough, it was precisely that hockey triumph in Stockholm that marked the end of Czechoslovakia’s reform experiment in the late 1960s.

As soon as the referee blew his whistle, thousands of exhilarated Czechs and Slovaks filled the streets of towns and cities all over the country in boundless transports of joy. But once more, the secret police staged a provocation. When an agent disguised as hockey fan started demolishing the office of the Soviet airliner Aeroflot on Prague’s Wenceslas Square, he was immediately joined by hordes of enthusiastic citizens who had no idea that their actions would have tragic consequences.

But they had. To the orthodox wing of the communist party, the incident clearly proved one thing: Alexander Dubček, the party’s reformist general secretary, didn’t have the “anti-Soviet elements” under control, and therefore had to be sacked. Thus, the elation after the ice hockey victory over the Russians was soon replaced by 20 years of normalization.

Ice hockey’s political and nation-creating role has definitely not diminished in the post-communist Czech Republic. Thanks to the recent successes in World Championships (gold medals in 1996, 1999, 2000 and 2001) and in the Olympic games in Nagano in 1998 it still is an inexhaustible source of national pride. In addition, a career as a professional hockey player with a million-dollar salary has become a far more realistic goal than it used to be.

In the aftermath of 1968, nearly 100 hockey players emigrated to the West. After the Velvet Revolution, they have been followed by hordes of others. Today, the US-Canadian National Hockey League would probably cease to exist if all the star players of Czech origin disappeared. But only for a couple of days, for hundreds of young and talented Czechs would be more than willing to replace them.

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