Almost 80 years ago, there were practically only four skiers in the Czech Republic who owned roller skis for summer training. Do you know when the first roller ski races took place in the country?

Roller skis in the Czech Republic – Who started it all?

The Jenka brothers from Mladá Boleslav. Josef Jenka, a sports innovator and the inventor of the JENKA cross-country ski binding, came up with and built unusually simple and affordable roller skis.

Using discarded wooden skis with broken tips left over from winter, he cut nearly one-meter-long center sections with bindings. At both ends, wheels were attached with wing screws to an axle welded to a metal profile. For propulsion – a brilliantly simple design – a rubber block was fixed to the base of the ski under the foot. When the skier pushed off, the block pressed against the road, allowing propulsion without slipping during the single-leg gliding phase.

A major advantage of this roller ski model was that it could be adjusted to be stiffer (by moving the wheels closer to the binding and heel) or softer (by moving the wheels farther from the foot).

The quartet of athletes training on these early roller skis belonged to the elite of Czech endurance skiing. Ing. V. Novák was an Olympian (1936 Garmisch-Partenkirchen) and a three-time national champion. J. Jenka, originally from Police nad Metují, had won silver at the national championships. Bohouš Tvrzník, pictured racing a tram, took bronze in the Czechoslovak championship relay for Spartak Sokolovo. From 1953, he became the national coach, and for 18 seasons (1956–1973), he served as the head coach of the Czechoslovak Ski Association.

The first races in Turnov

On Sunday, October 20, 1974 – just six months after the Czech team claimed three medals at the World Championships in Falun (Paulů, Henych, and the women’s relay) – the first edition of a roller ski race took place on the Turnov motorcycle racing circuit. And what a show it was! Over a thousand cheering spectators enthusiastically supported the full Czech national men’s team, led by star skier Standa Henych.

One of the first races of its kind in the Czech Republic, it was filmed by Czech Television for the sports program BBV. The cameraman, sitting on a wooden plank in the back of an open Gazik (Soviet off-road vehicle), kept urging – even yelling at – the driver to speed up, warning that the leading skier would crash into them otherwise. At the front of the pack was Jirka Beran, who, on the descent from Hruštice to the hospital, caught up to a car traveling at 60 km/h — then the speed limit within town limits.

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Turnov race results

Beran won the inaugural roller ski race by over a minute ahead of Henych, with Jarda Seidl taking bronze. Forty men finished the race. Beran had the fastest lap time (four laps were raced), clocking 11:28 in the opening circuit. The fastest junior, future biathlete Josef Skalník from Nové Město, clocked 12:22.2, while the winning younger junior woman, Zuzana Matoušová from Sokol Horní Branná, had the best women’s time with 12:47.

The unexpected hero of the day was Petr Just from Tanvald, who finished 7th overall. In 1974, he was a conscript competing for Dukla Liberec. On the third lap, while navigating a sharp right-hand turn at Kečkemét, he failed to control the tight radius and plowed into the dense crowd of spectators. As fate would have it, the tip of his Liljedahl ski tore the uniform of a captain in the Soviet occupation forces stationed in Turnov. This “incident” caused serious trouble for the local ski club organizers. The very next day, a delegation of officers from the Red Army visited the municipal office to lodge a complaint and firmly demanded a ban on such events, claiming they endangered Soviet military commanders.

Such was the backdrop to the pioneering seasons of roller ski racing in the Czech Republic.

The article was originally published on Bezky.net in May 2021.

Also Read – Kateřina Smutná advises on how much to train on roller skis

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