The Tale of Rashka

Jiří Raška won the Olympic gold medal in ski jumping on the medium hill at the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. Fans in Czechoslovakia were delighted, and the writer Ota Pavel later described the two perfect jumps in his unforgettable The Tale of Rashkov.

"He checked the speed on the on-ramp with his ears, he could hear in his ears how fast it was going, how it was whizzing. Then he bounced and leveled off, and then he experienced only the joy of flight. He had seen out of the corner of his eye the cones on the tops of the spruce trees, which he could always easily tear off, he had torn through the skins of the lambs grazing low to the ground a few times, and he had frightened the chattering ravens with the swish of his skis, " Oldřich Kaiser enjoyed the familiar words again.

The part in which Ota Pavel describes the struggle for the gold medal is also the favourite part of The Tale of Rashka, which was also written by the director of the audiobook Aleš Vrzák. "That part of the fight, where the athlete is fighting with his body, surroundings, with that, that no one wishes him well, and in the end, he will win, I find it terribly encouraging and optimistic for our lives in general, explains in a radio direction.