“Both handball, where I was a goalie, and basketball itself, are both very, very…movement-oriented sports. So already, I believe, I had a great deal of neuro-muscular co-ordination and pathways developed. When I started to throw the discus, my old coach, Otakar Jandera was his name, a very venerable coach, said to me ‘at your level of athleticism, all you need is learn the technique and catch the rhythm of it’. He started me off by playing the Blue Danube over and over again on the loudspeakers in the stadium, and had me making turns. I can say that before I went to the Olympic Games I probably had, say, from the age of 14 – before those two years – seven years of really heavy training.”

“But somehow fate brought us together, and we found that although we were from opposite or far away corners of the world, and definitely from political systems that seemed to be completely incompatible, that when it came to basic human values and observations, we were extremely similar. We were trying to converse in my very fragmented English, and his fragmented German, because he'd travelled in Germany before. We were kind of putting together ideas and views and we were surprisingly close together. From that developed, besides curiosity and friendship, also a feeling of love.”

“When the wedding day arrived and our cars couldn't get to the square, I thought there'd been an accident. But actually some say 25,000, some say 30,000 people…had turned out to see the wedding...on the Old Town Square. Some came because they had never seen Dana and Emil Zátopek, who were our witnesses. Some came to see the American who'd come to Prague – they'd never seen a regular, average American, or an American champion like that…others came to support me. And it turned into this crowded festival – people had fun!”