Book Club Claire is back with our final selection of 2024, which is Today We Die a Little! The Inimitable Emil Zatopek, The Greatest Olympic Runner of All Time by Richard Askwith. This is the 2016 biography of the world-famous Czechoslovakian runner Emil Zatopek who competed in long-distance races at London 1948, Helsinki 1952 and Melbourne 1956, racking up five Olympic medals. At Helsinki, Zatopek was the first–and only–person to win gold in 5000, 10000, and marathon. Also, that was the first time he’d ever run a marathon.
Zatopek was self-coached and known for some really out-there training techniques like intervals that most people at the time did not use, but have become more ingrained today. He was also known for a unique running style in which he looked like he was in massive pain and flopping around. Check it out here:
With his endless string of victories and world records, Zatopek became a legend in Czechoslovakia and around the globe, an important figure who gave a small nation global recognition. He also was an interesting figure in Cold War politics who got into some trouble with the governments of the Iron Curtain.
Author Richard Askwith viewed Zatopek as a hero, and set out to write the “full, extraordinary story” of his favorite runner. However, Askwith discovers along the way that even extraordinary people are still human.
What did we think of the book? Find out in this week’s episode!
Claire also unveils the selections for next year’s book club. Look for them on our Bookshop.org affiliate page!
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive!
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TRANSCRIPT
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369-Book Club Claire on Today We Die a Little
Jill Jaracz: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keep the Flame Alive, the podcast for fans of the Olympics and Paralympics. If you love the games, we are the show for you. Each week, we share stories from athletes and people behind the scenes to help you have more fun watching the games. I’m host Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co host, Alison Brown.
Alison, hello.
Alison Brown: Gobble, gobble. How are you? Happy Thanksgiving!
Jill Jaracz: Are you thoroughly in food coma now? I should be. I should be. Hopefully. Well, actually we are traveling on Thanksgiving Day this year as our way. As it is our turn to, to travel. So we will be on the road on Thanksgiving and we will be celebrating mostly on Friday, I think.
Alison Brown: Oh, you know what? I am a full supporter of you celebrate Thanksgiving when it works for you.
Jill Jaracz: it’s Thanksgiving Day and we are thankful for our patrons who keep our flame alive. Thank you. Literally, by keeping our show going with our financial contributions. This is the time of the year where we give a shout out to our Golden Committee member level patrons. So we’ll be celebrating a patron every week in this week, celebrating Jennifer Schultz, who has been a long time patron, Jennifer,
Alison Brown: she’s, she goes back a ways.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. We won’t say how old, but
Because then it forces us to realize how old this show is. I know, and how old we are. Yeah. Let’s not talk about that. But Jennifer, thank you for keeping our flame alive for so many years, and we really appreciate your support. And you can find out more about becoming a member of Patreon at patreon. com slash flame live pod.
You can also gift patreon memberships as well. So if you are looking for a unique gift or, uh, want to give your gift givers who want to know what to give you. Another option is you could ask for a Patreon gift membership. Find out more at patreon. com slash flame alive pod. And thank you, Jennifer. It’s book club week.
Alison Brown: I love book club week because when we get to see Claire, so that’s always fabulous. And this spoiler alert. was really good.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. Yeah. We’ve had some good books this year. So that’s been nice. Uh,
Book Club Claire on “Today We Die a Little!”
Jill Jaracz: Book Club Claire is back. We are discussing Today We Die a Little, The Inmitable Imel Zotopec, The Greatest Olympic Runner of All Time by Richard A.
Askwith. It is a biography of the Czechoslovakian runner who competed in long distance races at London, 1948, Helsinki, 1952, and Melbourne, 1956. He was self coached and known for some really out there training techniques like intervals, which was not really popular back in the day. and other things that most people at the time did not use.
Those training techniques have become more ingrained today. He was also known for a unique running style in which he looked like he was in massive pain and kind of flopped around a little bit with his upper body. Also one that is noted a lot. At London, he won silver in the 5, 000 meters and gold in the 10, 000 meters, but Helsinki 1952 was his crowning achievement.
He’s the first and only person to win gold in the 5, 000, 10, 000, and the marathon, which was his first marathon he ever ran. , he became a hero in Czechoslovakia and around the globe, an important figure who gave a small nation global recognition.
At, 1956, he was not quite as successful. He dropped out of a couple of races and he competed in the
Let’s just say. so we talk about those races. We also talk about how he was an interesting figure in Cold War politics who got into some trouble with the governments of the Iron Curtain. Take a listen.
Book Club Claire: Claire, welcome back. What do you got for us? I have our second and final book club book of 2024 called Today We Die a Little, the inimitable Emil Zatopek, the greatest Olympic runner of all time by Richard Askwith. And this has been a book that has been in our queue for quite a few years. And only now have we decided to give it a shot.
So I want to Ask you first, who was the MVP of the book, and why was it Dana Zatopek?
Seriously, she’s the queen.
Jill Jaracz: she really is. And she, I think she held it together. She, she was married to a man who very much had the limelight. And who’s sometimes took precedence over hers. She was also dealing with a husband who couldn’t shut up in a place where you had to keep quiet. If that makes sense. I didn’t want to, it was great that he was super friendly and outgoing and gregarious and spoke a ton of, taught himself how to speak a ton of languages so we could talk to people, but living in communist Czechoslovakia at the time that made life very tough in a way and so she did have to put up with a lot of extra scrutiny and not just because she herself was an elite athlete, but also because her husband’s motormouth kind of affected their lives after a while.
Alison Brown: Yes, Dana was amazing. I’m actually going to give the MVP to the author on this one because I thought he did an absolutely brilliant job of balancing that Emil is human, and he’s also superhuman, and he did heroic things, and he did not heroic things. Askwith talked a little bit about his own conflicted view, and I thought he balanced the story brilliantly, and I was left conflicted myself about Emile and what I thought of him and his career, which I think is probably accurate.
Book Club Claire: I would wholeheartedly agree. I think that Richard Askwith did an amazing job with this book. It is a rather large book. Book, but it doesn’t ever seem too monotonous. It, he keeps it engaging with talking about the training and the races and also the dealings with the Soviets, how they were coming in and.
into Czechoslovakia and he does a really nice job and it, for once he does admit that, you know, this is kind of my opinion. We’ve read so many other books where opinions are stated as facts or, you know, especially with the autobiographies that we’ve read, what I write down on this paper is law and some people trust it and others don’t and there’s all that conflict.
But Asquith is just very blunt and says. Here’s the two sides. Here’s what I think. And there’s even a whole chapter basically of him kind of explaining his rationale. but going back to Dana, who I still, I am on Jill’s side with, her being the MVP. I did not realize. That she had won a gold medal, and I did not realize she won it within an hour of her husband.
And we, we’ve been talking about Hunter Woodall and Tara Davis Woodall and how they won a paralympic gold and an Olympic gold in the same year. But can you imagine winning with your husband’s within an hour of each other? I thought that was amazing. the fact that she was a world class athlete and married another world class athlete and maybe even beyond world class for him and they made it work and they trained together and they worked together and they stuck with each other even through thick and thin and I just think she is the best.
And every time she came up in the book, I was just like, Oh, yeah, more data.
Alison Brown: And I don’t think a not. athlete could have put up with Emil because she could understand it to a point. She understood, I mean, he took his interval training and his training to almost grotesque levels, but she got it and she knew that drive and that feeling.
And then when his career was over and hers kind of wasn’t. Yeah. She could accept what he was going through because she knew that was coming for her. And so I don’t think anybody else could have put up with the ups and downs that.
Jill Jaracz: And when it was bad weather, somebody who would be running in place in the house for hours on end.
Book Club Claire: Yeah. Those, the training methods that he came up with were at times eye opening. It’s like, Oh, this is where, Interval training kind of started the genesis of that, but also there were some like running in the tub or something going, You really thought that was a good idea? Okay. My question is regarding his training.
Do you think he needed to do the interval training? In order to be a gold medal athlete, or do you think he would have had enough natural talent for it to bloom on its own? It’s an interesting question. It came to my mind because he was so invested in his training. It’s like, did he need to do all of that?
What do you think?
Alison Brown: I’m going to say yes, because I think we now have too much at stake of talent. Like we talk about, Oh, this person is so talented. And the biggest thing that I think I’ve learned from talking to so many athletes is yes, talent plays a part. Commitment and dedication are what make the difference between good athletes and elite athletes and gold medalists.
And that killing yourself in training. is what, and I mean not, and we, there is such a thing as overtraining, but that commitment to doing better, pushing yourself harder is what makes the difference.
Jill Jaracz: That and he may not have needed such intense interval training to win, but when, when you You think about how much he was shattering records by in terms of seconds and minutes and when I read the book, and I was just trying to picture him lapping people constantly in major races, that just is a testament to how much his training worked and how, how much they were shattering records by.
And you don’t necessarily see the same kind of. shattering of records. You see records dropping, but it’s not by like 20 seconds but I think that the interval training just played to his advantage and really propelled the concept of what you needed to do to train, to be the best you could be.
Book Club Claire: It was interesting because this was another Soviet era. Olympic book. There are so many of them because a lot happened in that Cold War time. This is the first one where performance enhancing drugs never played a part. It was just this guy
Alison Brown: that we know of, that
Book Club Claire: we know of. but it’s just that. He just had so much raw talent that he knew how to train and he was living at just the right time where he was, shocking the world with, with his talent, you know, emerging out of Czechoslovakia, not known for its running on like, places like France and Great Britain at the time.
And it really dominating for at least two Olympics and many years in between as well. Do you think a coach? Would have helped or hindered his training
Alison Brown: Hindered. I think any coach would have said to him you’re not a meal Don’t do this. Don’t train like this. Don’t, do these intervals. Don’t go running in your boots.
Jill and I were together this weekend. So we were reading it at the same time. And, you know, don’t go running in the woods in your army boots because the one thing Jill said to me was, how does he never trip on a root? You know, how does he never sprain his ankle? And it’s very true. The fact that he had it.
One serious injury, but not constant serious injuries. No coach would have let him train the way he did.
Jill Jaracz: Concur. Jill? Yeah, totally agree. I think that a coach would have, and probably especially in that place during that time. And if you’re talking about a cold war era, I coach would have tried to lay down the hammer and say, no, you have to train the way I say.
And. We would not have gotten the same Emil. We would have not gotten the same results or even the same way you push the sport forward.
Book Club Claire: I think the only coach that would have helped him in any way would have been a coach that was as crazy as he was. If somebody was, you know, Totally outside the box who you might have come across if a meal existed now and was training now, where people are so much more open to new ideas and things that could change the landscape.
But at that time, as you said, Jill, there was such a more strict. training regimen. He needs the coach from Chariots of Fire.
Alison Brown: I was just thinking that. That’s exactly what I was going to say. He needs Abrams, uh, coach from Chariots of Fire, the coach willing to go outside the box and willing to buck the system and do things differently to push the sport forward.
Book Club Claire: I don’t even know if I’ve seen all of Chariots of Fire And if I have, it’s been way too long. I Is this based on, you know, I know the story is based on a true story, but is the coach based on real facts? Okay. He, he is,
Alison Brown: he is mu I think the name was. but yeah, he was a very unconventional coach at the time.
Book Club Claire: These were questions that came up to me as I’m reading about his, you know, strict interval regimen. He was so strict on himself.
I think that’s the only way he could have succeeded without a coach for his entire career, which is pretty amazing. , he was in three Olympics. He was in 1948 and 1952 and 1956 in London. Helsinki and Melbourne. What was a story from one of those Olympics that stuck out to you, besides him and Dana winning gold within an hour of each other?
Alison Brown: I thought it was interesting because we did read the book about Melbourne 1956. So seeing that Olympics come back and some of the things that we read about in that book from a different angle, the concern about. defections from the, Eastern block, the, the minders and the sharp eyes that they talked about watching all the Eastern athletes and they all knew it.
And just that, that cold war feeling again. You know, whenever we read about the cold war, it takes me back to when I was a kid. And I mean, Jill and I grew up with that, hearing that news and that, you know, the fifties and the sixties and the seventies and even into the eighties, it was so similar with that us and them, and they were so different.
And here’s a meal coming in, learning 47 different languages to talk to everybody and how nobody could. Even the sharp eyes could not contain this man.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah. 1956 was interesting for me because I didn’t realize he had that long of a career. And that’s, you know, in an era where you’re talking about people are usually one and done for the most part because of amateurism.
So then on the flip side, I was surprised to see him at London 1948 as well, just because we know, I know of a male Zotopek as. Helsinki 1952. Like, that’s his games. But to see him before he becomes a name and to see him when he is so, has so much faith in his training and then it doesn’t play out exactly As he wants it to in London, which fuels the fire to do even more to make sure he is on top at Helsinki that that I really enjoyed and seeing how again, we talked a little bit about those austerity games and seeing them from his perspective.
And I did go back and watch a little bit of highlight video. To see that, you know, it rained that day. So the cinders were everywhere and everyone’s kind of coated in mud and they’re just running and running and running. And he just doesn’t quite. make it, but it’s a thrilling race nonetheless. So that’s a precursor of what to come, what’s to come.
Book Club Claire: You can’t have Helsinki without London for him because he, he learned a very important lesson. And that’s something that, that track athletes in distance racing on the track, that’s something that distance racers who do the track learn very quickly. One of the first races for, at least for the men’s, , most years is the 10, 000 because there’s no heats.
They just shove them all there and they say good luck and they shoot the gun and you’re off. But he learned very quickly, he, he can dominate the 10K. But then a few days later, he’s going to have a heats for the 5, 000 and a finals. and nowadays, I think there’s even three rounds for the 5k that he needed to pace himself.
And because he learned that in London, he needed that for Helsinki. And I mean, Helsinki, he even threw in the marathon for good measure, you know, why not just keep on running, which is insane. Just thinking that he had never run a marathon before. Before that, like the length of a marathon, although nowadays, a lot of people don’t run the length of a marathon until they run the marathon.
but it’s, it’s amazing to me to see how he learns his lesson from 1 to the other and Melbourne having to travel by boat, all the way to Australia, which at the time did not take a very short amount of time and then have to deal with all of that. And also that’s where the title of the book comes from because he lines up for his marathon in Melbourne and he, he just looks to his buddies on his left and his right and he says, you know, today we’re going to die a little.
And I think to pick that title for the book was Chef’s Kiss. I think that was very spot on. any other Olympic things that you wanted to cover? I know there’s a lot to this book and only like a third of it is Olympic related, but I wanted to make sure you had time to cover that Olympic side of things.
Alison Brown: Are we going to talk about the pre 52, I’m not going? Yeah, the, the prologue,
Book Club Claire: he had a friend who was detained and not allowed to go. And so he sits out the team flight to Helsinki and as the, kind of the Michael Phelps of his country, that was a big deal. Fortunately, they did allow his friend to join up with the team.
That was probably the first time where he really took a stand. I think. And maybe it went to his head because he kept going after that. did you have any other thoughts on it?
Alison Brown: The scariest thing to me in that 52 moment was Dana’s on the plane and she’s taking off and he’s not with her. So now she’s flown to Helsinki.
He’s back in Czechoslovakia. She’s trying to achieve her dreams and she doesn’t know if her husband’s been arrested and, and disappeared. cause he’s taking a political stance against the communist Soviet backed government and people did just disappear. I mean, probably not someone of his caliber, but still.
So how terrifying that must have been for her , to just sit on that plane and take off and not know what was going to happen for a couple of days. It seemed like.
Jill Jaracz: yeah. And it was interesting because you also have the government officials who have detained him and are they going to be the hardliners and crush his dreams or.
To prove a point, and then who knows what they would do with him next, he’d probably be in jail or camp or something for a long time, or do they let him go and he would be the one to bring Czechoslovakia glory on a global stage, because he really did do it. bring a lot of attention, great attention to the country because of his success at the, these Olympics.
I mean, it’s a really interesting of these standoffs and, and the tension and, you know, we talk with athletes today about the pressures they’re under. These athletes were under different kinds of pressures, I think, but pressure all the same.
Book Club Claire: He ended up becoming a real icon in Europe because of the things that he did.
So for him to not have made that appearance in Finland for the Olympics in 52 would have. Been very noticed by the people in Europe, because if they followed track and field between the gap years of 48 to 52, they knew his name. They knew he was breaking records. so I think that’s the. I don’t want to say they made the right choice, letting him go.
I think that what they did was dumb, to even detain him in the first place because, or to detain his friend so that he felt like he needed to make that stand and say, no, I’m not going to go unless you do this. , but they made the wrong choice and then they made the right choice in letting him go.
yeah, that was, that was a big story, that as far as I know was not Big news at the time, because nobody knew about it, because that’s how communist led countries kind of ran things. Speaking of, I did notice there is this kind of back and forth in the book, which Asquith balances pretty well of Emile, kind of the revolutionary balanced with Emile, the person who is, Putting out statements, decrying or speaking against the people who are against communism and the letter that he released in the newspaper between, the Prague spring where he was super supportive.
it was interesting to hear that. So I, we know Asquith’s opinion on Zatopek and what he was thinking. Do you have kind of an ultimate opinion on Zatopek, the Czech? Man, when it comes to his role in. Soviet politics of Czechoslovakia.
Alison Brown: I think he was ordinary in many ways in that he supported communism. He had grown up under fascism. He had seen the evils on the other way. And he was a good Czech communist in some ways. He also recognized the oversteps, the danger, the, censorship, the suppression of ideas, suppression of people.
But in the end, he wasn’t an anti communist hero. He was an ordinary athlete who felt both sides. You know, I want to run, I want to do my thing, but this isn’t fair. But am I going to go to prison over this? I don’t know. It’s too far. So I don’t think he’s a hero. I don’t think he’s a villain. I think he was a very ordinary man in very extraordinary times.
Jill Jaracz: And one who his job and his livelihood really depended on towing the line at times. And I’m sure there are plenty of moments where he got talkings to. And especially when there’s, Elements of the book where Asquith finds, oh, he signed his name to X document that got printed in the paper and we’re going to blow up the signature for everyone to see that your hero has let you down again.
And we don’t know and, and Asquith, you can’t really, he, he says, like, you can’t definitively find these things out. And a lot of records from this era got destroyed. Did he really believe that? Or did he have to sign it because he had to sign it and how much of a stand is he willing to take like Ellison said, there are people in Czech history who spent time in prison.
Václav Havel is one of the big ones who, once the wall went down, he became the president, but I think Zatopek’s life and livelihood were a little different. Havel could still write in prison. Or at least think in prison. Meanwhile, Zatopek, if he wasn’t running, I don’t think he’d be as inspirational if he wasn’t still appearing on the global stage, to be quite honest.
Alison Brown: And he does fall from grace. Oh. He does get exiled and shunned and pushed aside and forgotten. And it breaks him in many ways. there was a good 10 years toward the end of his life, where he becomes an alcoholic and really, really struggles. And I don’t think that was an atypical story in the Eastern Bloc in those, Iron Curtain years.
I think a lot of people were broken and it’s, It is unfair to judge them by our standards, both in the West and today, to say, what is more important, surviving, getting through, coming out the other side, or this stance? And everybody has to make that choice for themselves.
Jill Jaracz: we don’t know that maybe Zatopek, maybe he didn’t think far enough in advance to, I will not be running someday.
I mean, kind of near the end of his competitive career, you start to see him saying, okay, I’m not going to run the 5, 000 anymore. But how much did he plan for life after? running. And once he was done running, he was of no use to the army and they could finally go after him for not towing the line for his entire running career and saying, and they could have, I don’t want to say the last laugh, but you know, they played the waiting game and once Zatopek was no longer useful to them, they could just, Toss him aside and I don’t think he was really ready for that because he was a national hero and he thought that would Stay at least in some elements and it it really didn’t and that that it is very tragic how he fell from grace
it’s really kind of hard and sad to read about him being a regular person during his prime really came back to bite him once his career was over.
Alison Brown: It also seemed like that was the one place where Asquith was. Critical of his ego, where it seemed like Zatopek didn’t understand that he was getting away with stuff, that he just thought, I’m fabulous.
I can say what I want. I can do what I want. And because I’m me, nobody’s going to come after me. And that’s not how regimes like this work, right? When you’re useful, like Jill said, then they’ll, they’ll accept some variance. But once you’re not useful, man, is that going to come back at you?
Book Club Claire: As I was reading about Zatopek’s ups and downs, especially post career, all I could think of was, yeah, those are the things that I would have done.
or this is the things that an average human would have done. They’re not thinking, you know, I must preserve my image for people. He didn’t have an agent that was like, Oh, that’s probably a bad idea. He’s just doing what any regular human would have done In his shoes, and I can really respect that, that this was one of the first books where I was really seeing him just as an average person, just doing the things of life.
And yes, sometimes those led him to make mistakes, and sometimes it led him to make really good decisions, but I, I did really respect. ask with, and Zatopek for that, because I couldn’t think of him as either the, the hero or the villain, just like you were, had mentioned. It’s just some dude who spoke up, didn’t realize he probably shouldn’t have, because he doesn’t have an image, coordinator making sure that his name is not rolled through the mud.
Alison Brown: and then when he realized he shouldn’t have spoken back down. Back down to protect himself, back down to protect his wife and his friends and, you know, said things like when people, when he was exiled, you know, don’t, don’t be seen with me. It’s not good for you because I made some mistakes.
Book Club Claire: It brings up an interesting topic that always pops up when you’re talking about a sports figure who grows up in momentous times of history is how much pressure should be put on them to speak out.
For their country, whether it’s for or against something that they’re doing, we’ve been dealing with that in recent years with things that have happened and it kind of brings it back again, seeing what history has shown with
Jill Jaracz: that’s an interesting point because you do get that.
throughout history is people who protest in one way or another, or they’re trying to use their platform to say something. We see that we definitely saw it in Mexico city, 1968 with the fist. we saw it in, Tokyo. They had some non podium protests. We saw it with the runner who made the X. over his, chest in the marathon in a recent Olympics. We saw it in Paris with the breakdancing woman from Afghanistan who had the free Afghan women, uh, sign on her cape on the field of play.
So there is a lot of wanting to make a statement and highlight some injustice that is happening to, uh, an athlete’s people, but how successful is that? And do we remember the protest or do we remember the situation that they’re protesting and how much does the protest affect the situation, whether good or bad?
Alison Brown: You know, and so often here in the United States, Certainly, there’s been lots of protests surrounding professional football and the whole idea of shut up and play and what do we want from our athletes?
We want our athletes to agree with us. So if they’re protesting something that we agree with or over the course of history proves them right. they mentioned this in this book, the Vera Koshlowska, protest against the Soviet Union in Mexico City. She’s viewed as a hero, right, for, for making that because she was on the right side of history.
I’m sure the Russians would have a very different opinion of that podium protest. So, Um, when they agree with us, great. When they don’t, then they’re villains. So where does that fall down? And how do you know 50 years from now how that’s going to look down his history? You just have to do what’s right in your soul, right?
You have to make those choices personally. And I think that’s what this book does so successfully in showing that, Emil was both, you know, he was a guy, he was an athlete, he was trying to do his thing, trying to make it through life. And. Yeah, when he saw injustice, he wanted to do something about it, but he wasn’t a freedom fighter in his gut.
That wasn’t where he, his life was. His life was running.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah. And it’s interesting what we look to athletes for and any kind of celebrity, do we, we look for them for how to live or what to buy, what to wear, how to look. Why shouldn’t they? athletes and celebrities be able to say, Hey, this problem is important and draw attention to it.
I will say, I did enjoy the Vera Kozlowska, cameo that showed up in this book and how she got treated. We saw what happened afterwards and how she got exiled as well. That was so interesting.
Book Club Claire: it makes, What’s happening nowadays a little more relevant because a lot of times I’m seeing this right now in a community that I’m in on social media where people are implying.
Well, politics is not relevant to this topic that we’re discussing and, you know, everybody’s just coming up. Well, of course it is, you know, it’s everywhere and. You can’t tell somebody an athlete to shut up and play because they’re going to be affected by it just as much as, as you are, kind of makes this, topic pretty relevant for this month, if I do say so myself, well, a final question that I have, and then I’ll open it up to you guys.
Why do you think he stayed in Czechoslovakia? Because he did have offers when he went overseas to defect and coach both in Sweden and Finland, if not others. Why do you think he stayed? And I think we’ve talked about it, but just, you can just say it now.
Alison Brown: He was home. He was Czech. And that was the end of the story.
Why would he want to be someplace else besides home?
Jill Jaracz: I also think and wonder if he had some sort of awareness that he would not have been a good coach for others. And if you go over and you coach and you’re, you know, your athletes are not receptive to your kind of training, or you can only think that this is the kind of training that works.
And that’s it. I mean, it was probably the same kind of runner and would have been a coach the way that coaches are trained. Would have been bad for him. We just talked about how if you have a coach that’s set in their ways and they’re like this is how you do it and that’s it I think Zatopek would have been the same kind of coach.
This is the way that works. And that was the way that worked for him but it’s not going to be the way that worked for other athletes. I’m not sure he would have been able to be as successful. and he had a comfortable life. in Czechoslovakia. So do you give that up for maybe the awareness that life might have been more difficult in the West in terms of, Oh, I had to fend for myself a lot more.
Book Club Claire: I tend to think along the lines of you guys, of course, he wasn’t going to leave because he wanted to stay and defend his, his country from what he would have thought, you know, it was ruining his country. I also think, well, if he had left to coach, regardless of the coaching, but he could have been a bigger outspoken voice to say, this is what is in Czechoslovakia. These are the things that you’re not seeing behind the scenes and could have been an even bigger force to show that where, somebody who’s behind the Iron Curtain doesn’t get that much play. that, that’s the only reason I was really thinking, well, he could have, because he could have kept speaking about it and made it more relevant to people because they knew who he was.
the, That’s what came to my mind as I was thinking about this. do you have any final thoughts on the book or on Zatopek in general?
Jill Jaracz: I’ve really enjoyed this, book. you look at it and you’re like, wow, this is a really thick book, but it’s highly readable. And I wouldn’t say it’s like the quickest read, but it’s not a slow read at all.
It just kind of kept going and the way Askworth outlined it and told the story, it really kept moving along and it was so engaging. I just really enjoyed reading this book and I do have to say, by the end when we’re dealing with all of his exile, it makes me want to read a John le Carré novel, which is on my nightstand right now.
Alison Brown: I thought this book was extremely successful on many, many different levels. It was an interesting biography. It was an interesting analysis of cold war politics. It was interesting, for athletics fans cause you got to see some of the training. it was interesting for us as Olympic fans. So definitely top two or three of the books we’ve read in terms of just, I came away from this book knowing.
So much more and understanding so much more on many different things. So I highly recommend,
Book Club Claire: yeah, if you have not read this book, it is definitely worth picking up. like I mentioned earlier, we’ve had this on the list for many years and only now did we pick it out and it’s like, oh, it was worth it.
It was worth having it on the shelf. You know, it’s one that reappears. I’m a little disappointed because the, book that I got, it’s from a library and it says withdrawn from the library. This book was only published in 2016 and the fact that it’s already withdrawn is kind of sad because it’s like nobody checked it out.
You should check it out. So if, if you’re not going to buy it, go to your library and check it out so that it doesn’t get discarded. But yes, very good book. Asked with if, if he wrote any more Olympic based or Paralympic based, books. I would love to check those out for sure. But that’s a wrap on Emile’s Zatopek .
Jill Jaracz: Excellent. It’s been a highly entertaining year in book club, I would say. the, the two choices were both so, so good. And, just makes me love the fact that we have a book club even more. So thank you, Claire, for all that you do.
2025 Book Club Selections
Jill Jaracz: And what are we looking forward to in 2025?
Book Club Claire: I can’t believe it’s already 2025.
that’s insane. I’m, I’m a child of the 90s and 2025 was like the future. Anyway, we have three books for 2025 that we’re going to be reading. And one of them is by Ashok Flestani. She’s going to be our first read of the year. Sydney Collier, she’s a Paralympian and she wrote a book called Beyond Expectations.
We’re going to be reading that one in March so that maybe that would make a good. Christmas present for someone, if you want to take a read of that, then we are going to be going back in time, not too far to 2018. And uh, I don’t know if you are in the, Facebook group, dear listener, but they just asked how did you find, keep the flame alive podcast?
And a lot of people were saying, you know, from certain Olympics. And for me, I discovered this podcast when I was. listening for the PyeongChang Olympics in 2018. And so, we are going to go back to that time, 2018, PyeongChang, South Korea, and we’re going to be reading A Team of Their Own, which is all about the unified Korean team, North and South Korea, for the women’s hockey tournament of that year.
and one that also has been on our list for a bit, so it’ll be interesting to read that one. And then at the end of the year, we’re going to take a little break in the summertime. We’re going to be reading Above and Beyond by Tim Mack. He is an American pole vaulter who competed around the turn of the century, and we’re going to be hearing his story.
So those are the three books we’ve got. Tim Mack is from Cleveland area. That’s why you pushed for this book.
Jill Jaracz: That’s another one. He’s got a really, really interesting story about, it’s a very much an underdog story Not making the olympics not making the olympics and then making the olympics So I’m really excited to read his story.
Book Club Claire: I will say Any chance for us to do more track and field books? I am not going to say no, so go for it. Let’s do it.
Jill Jaracz: Excellent. Well, Claire, thank you so much as always, and we will look forward to seeing you next year. Happy new year.
Follow Claire!
Jill Jaracz: Thank you so much, Claire. You can follow Claire on Insta and YouTube at CNAT Travels. She’s got some of her own Paris 2024 videos up on her YouTube page. She did a lot of ours as well.
So they’re up on our channel. So we will have links to those in the show notes. I was thinking about this as we were getting ready for the show.
More thoughts on Emil Zatopek
Alison Brown: Were you thinking about how you got to say Czechoslovakia multiple times?
Jill Jaracz: I did think that as I was just saying it. That was awesome. I also have to admit that I have fallen into a little Cold War comfort reading, and I am now reading Jean le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Alison Brown: So you’ve got East Germany and Yugoslavia back on deck.
Jill Jaracz: I know, and besides a shelf full of Olympic and Paralympic books, I do have a shelf full of Cold war type books, so I think I’m going to be working my way through some of that stuff.
Alison Brown: It’s Czechoslovakia and Jill’s house this holiday season.
Jill Jaracz: Oh, you better believe it.
But, you know, Askwith calls Zatypek the greatest Olympic runner of all time. And it feels like that gets, that title gets bestowed. on long distance runners more so than sprinters and we’ve got some great sprinters throughout history and especially in our lifetimes. We had Carl Lewis and we had, Usain Bolt,
Alison Brown: Michael and Michael Johnson.
Yes. Thank you. Did a double that nobody else has done a double double that nobody else has done and yes. But you know what? I think it is. Sprinters don’t run for very long. Um, I don’t mean that in years. I mean that in seconds. So distance runners, I think are like, there’s distance runners and then there’s sprinters.
I don’t know. Maybe just because you watch them for hours at a time.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s interesting. Yes. There’s something to be said for enduring long races, especially with the faster pace. pace that a long distance race can have and how you have to make that last for a longer period of time.
But there’s also something amazing about training to be the fastest runner in a race that is now less than 10 seconds.
Alison Brown: I wonder if it’s that distance runners do tend to have longer careers than sprinters so that you will see them for multiple Olympics. You know, it’s not strange as I depicted three Olympics, a lot of distance runners do multiples and then sometimes go from, say, the 10, 000 to the marathon.
You know, they have that longevity that sprinters. Um, certainly in the past didn’t have now a little bit more, but still, you know, it’s not unusual to be a one and done, Olympic sprinter.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah. It’s hard to maintain that speed, especially like you said, with the transitioning to longer and longer distance.
We saw that with Abdi, Abderrahman, who we read his book as well and talked with him and yeah, maybe, you know, That longevity and moving to a different distance helps, which then makes me ask, have any sprinters become marathoners? Oh, now, would you stop with the rabbit holes in Czechoslovakia? Have any Czechoslovakian sprinters become marathoners?
Alison Brown: I mean, it’s such a different, um, Um, not only physicality, but the brain of a distance runner. And I say this every time we talk to someone who does distance events, what do you think about? Like what’s on your mind during that time? A sprinter can’t think during his or her event. It’s too fast. There’s not enough time.
It’s too fast. They just have to trust their training and, and that their body will do what their body supposed to do. Distance athletes have to think. In a different way, they have to keep focus and they have to not let their minds wander. So to switch between those two would be such a different personality type.
Jill Jaracz: It’s interesting. we are, gonna touch base hopefully with Kenny Bednarik. He’s on the schedule, but as you know, it doesn’t happen until it happens. We had to put this on our list to ask him. What are you
Alison Brown: thinking about during the race?
Jill Jaracz: Right. Right. And can you think in, in some races and not in others,
Alison Brown: because he does the 100 and the 200 and those are very different races, even though they’re both sprints.
Jill Jaracz: Right. And would he consider adding distance? As he grows older,
Alison Brown: I bet he’s going to say, no, he’d be like, no, I don’t want to run that long. Who’s got time for that? I’d get bored. I bet a lot of sprinters would be like, no, I would get bored running that long.
Jill Jaracz: I am very curious about this now because I think we have talked to more long distance runners or people talking about longer distances , and even like middle distance where you’ve got a little time. But yeah, we don’t, we haven’t been able to talk to that many sprinters. So, so Kenny’s going to give us some insight.
Alison Brown: did you like Emile Zadopak? Like, would you have wanted to hang out with him?
Jill Jaracz: I don’t know. I bet he was a fun guy at like post race stuff or at the, the party. I think my apprehension about that is because I’m a woman. Oh, I bet people loved him. But I think of like what you talked about with Dana.
Alison Brown: Yeah.
Jill Jaracz: Like she put up with a lot.
Alison Brown: She did. I wouldn’t want to be married to him.
That’s for sure.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah. Yeah. That would be hard. But I don’t know. They probably had fun. I mean, if you were just like the type of couple who were like, yeah, come on over, but I think he was probably a little too careless for his time and place. I think he was too careless and I think that would have been very worrying to me.
You might let your guard down if you were in a different country, but if you weren’t in Czechoslovakia, how, I mean, ask what didn’t and probably couldn’t go into, the web of people that were connected to him, what happened to them and what, you know, were there any ramifications for knowing Emil or being close with him?
Alison Brown: What about you? I would have loved to hang out with him, but God forbid being married to him, I would have lost my mind. Or having to work with him. Like being his friend, or being a friend of a friend and you got to do things with him. Go to some of those parties. That would have been great, but to work with him would have probably been really difficult.
And scary. I mean what a scary time. We forget. How scary. That was in Czechoslovakia.
Jill Jaracz: Well, I will start reading gulag. I will remember. oh, well, it has been a good year for book club.
Get our Book Club selections at Bookshop.org
Jill Jaracz: We’ve got the next year’s books on tamp. We will have those at our bookshop. org site. We will have those at our bookshop. org site on our lists of, book club shows and, uh, books we’re reading. There’s also other lists that we’ve curated there. You can check those out at bookshop.
org slash shop slash flame alive pod. And, you know, any purchase that you make through that, our link will help us earn a commission. It doesn’t have to come from one of our curated lists and believe you me, any commissions we earn are greatly helpful as we, Wind down Paris, but we have to immediately wind up and start raising money for Milan, Cortina and any kind of travel associated with that as well.
Coming Soon
Jill Jaracz: So, thank you so much and thank you for listening. We do appreciate your listenership. Every day, but on this Thanksgiving day, especially. So that is going to do it for this episode while we go eat some Thanksgiving dinner. Hopefully you are celebrating as well. And if you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving because you’re in another country.
Celebrate anyway. Yeah. Right. Eat a good meal. let us know who you think the greatest runner is of all time.
Alison Brown: And we love hearing from you. You can chat with us and other listeners on our Facebook group. Keep the Flame Alive podcast. Email us at flamealivepod at gmail. com. The voicemail and text line is always open at 208 352 6348.
That’s 208 FLAME IT. If you need more Olympics and Paralympics in your life, And who doesn’t? Sign up for our newsletter at flamealivepod. com. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.
Jill Jaracz: Next week we will be back with more Paris memories as we talk with Paris Wimmer. Mackenzie Cohen, she has got some hot takes on the chocolate muffins.
So do not miss this conversation. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, keep the flame alive.