📍Kopřivnice, Moravian-Silesian Region, Czech Republic
1922 – 1937“I was born in September 1922 in Kopřivnice, a small town in the hills of northern Moravia, dominated by the Tatra works, the great factory that built cars and lorries. I was one of the youngest of a large, poor family; my father worked hard at the factory, and when the Depression came in the early 1930s, money was so short that I had to work before school from the age of nine. The town, the factory, the forests and the hills around us were my whole world. As a boy I ran everywhere, including, so the family story goes, several kilometres each day to fetch milk from a farm. But I never thought of myself as a runner. I left school at fourteen, and at sixteen I went to Zlín to work as an apprentice at the vast Bata shoe factory, a model industrial town where the company organised everything, including sport. In May 1941 the factory held a cross-country race for publicity and ordered a group of us boys to take part. I protested that I was too weak and even went to the doctor to get out of it, but he passed me fit, so I ran, and to my surprise I came second out of about a hundred. After that I began to train seriously, inventing my own methods of interval running, often in heavy army boots. At the 1952 Helsinki Olympics I won the 5,000 metres, the 10,000 metres and the marathon, my first ever, a feat no one has matched. Kopřivnice remembers me with a statue, and I am remembered alongside my wife, Dana, who won javelin gold on the same day as my 5,000 metres.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today