Episode 218: Olga

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This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate DeMau.

They found a place to put her.

She was an exceptional athlete.

had excelled at team handball for one of the biggest youth athletic clubs in Prague in the years after World War II.

Took her basketball team to the finals of an illustrious competition.

And the Czechoslovak Athletic Committee had their eyes on Olga Fukotova.

Tall and strong, bright and pretty, wide smile, a bob of brown curls.

She was a star student studying medicine at an elite university.

They had their eyes on her.

But everyone had their eyes on everyone.

Watching, noticing, asking other people to watch and notice and report back was at the heart of the Czech Communist Party's means to power.

They had a file on everyone.

But hers was thicker than most.

When she was starting high school, her father was disappeared for months, swept up in a purge of former military leaders from the previous regime, jailed without trial by the secret police.

After his release, when it was determined he was sufficiently loyal to the new state, the Central Committee kept close tabs on his whole family, especially his headstrong daughter, who had turned down a chance to join the Communist Party.

She said she liked to go to church too much.

She said she would never be able to fully embrace all the principles of Marxism and dialectical materialism.

She didn't want to pretend she could just to gain social advantage.

But she assured her interviewer that she loved Czechoslovakia.

That there was nothing she wanted more in this world than to bring glory to the nation while furthering the cause of global communism by winning gold at the Olympics.

Probably in handball.

She was really good at handball.

But it could be basketball.

She loved basketball.

Honestly, either would just...

They gave her a discus.

The Czechoslovakian Athletic Committee had a spot it needed to fill on its women's discus squad.

So that's where they put her.

She wasn't happy about it at first.

She missed her teammates.

She missed the freedom of basketball and handball.

The fluidity, the improvisation.

That was not what discus was about.

Discus was just her, alone, exploring the confines of a two and a half meter circle.

But she found her way, even within those bounds, built her body to crouch and twist and spin and explode.

Her coaches helped her find her rhythm by playing the blue danube over the speakers of the empty stadium where she practiced each morning, turned the push-spin-throw of the discus motion into a one-two-three of a waltz.

She did it again and again and again until she knew all of it.

The feel of her toe on the inside of the outer ring, the sound of her feet in their precise stride, the higher sound made by the brief twist of her planted toe, the angles, her shoulders, her hips, the tension in her forearms, the right pressure of her finger at the edge of the discus, how it felt, how it was all supposed to feel when the timing was right, when the stride was right, when she landed her toe at the edge of the circle but not over.

when the push, spin, throw goes one, two, three.

When she just about perfected that odd, brief dance within that tiny circle and let that discus go as far as it could soar, up and out,

however far it could go.

Turned out to be pretty far.

It took her to the other end of the earth, to Australia, for the 1956 Summer Olympics.

It felt like a dream.

To have left Prague just a few days before and find herself in the Melbourne sun among people from all over the world, athletes just like her.

She was in heaven.

And a couple of days in, with a few more days before the opening ceremony, and then her own competition on the game's very first session, she was hopping up the short steps to a supply shed to grab discuses and some chalk, and she smacked square into the chest of a muscle-bound man.

His hands grabbed her shoulders to keep her from tumbling backwards.

The letters on that chest read USA.

And this happens sometimes.

Life can really be like this.

If we're lucky, if we're present enough to notice and brave enough and quick enough to act.

Sometimes there is love at first sight.

Sometimes there is a meet cute, just like in the movie.

Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time and you are also single.

And yes, you do have time right then to take that walk or grab that drink.

And when they say, well, I hope I see you around, and you say, yeah, hope so too.

You really might because you're also lucky enough to have your life take place just then in some limited space.

You are on the same campus, you work in the same office complex, or you just moved into the same apartment building a couple blocks over from the beach.

And maybe, maybe even ideally, there'd be a ticking clock, something to force you out of your normal hesitancy.

Like you're just there for the summer, or it is your mutual friend's wedding weekend.

You will see them around.

And you will light up when you do.

And you won't play it cool because you know your time is short and that life is short.

This happens sometimes.

And so it was for Olga Fitkva of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and Harold Hal Connolly of the United States of America at the Olympic Village in Melbourne for a fortnight in 1956.

He was a hammer thrower.

which is basically like the discus with a different object and more spinning.

He was the best in the world.

He was tall and pretty handsome in an all-American, slightly goofy kind of way.

A lantern jaw and a big open smile and a face that, in just about every photo of him from this era, radiates a kind of perpetual stokedness,

like everything is going to be all good forever.

His arms were different lengths.

He told her on one of their first walks after bumping into each other again after that first bump at the equipment shed that a problem during his birth messed up one of his arms.

As a result, he kept breaking it, and had multiple surgeries that meant his left arm was four inches shorter than his right.

Couldn't really play baseball or football or basketball like the other boys.

Hence the hammer.

But there was no professional hammer throwing circuit, so he taught school.

English at a high school in Boston.

And here he was on the other side of the globe meeting a girl.

He was all earnest charm and witty retorts.

He'd offer to carry her equipment, she wouldn't let him.

They'd scheme to bump into each other, just happened to pass by the field where the other was training.

He'd get razzed by his friends.

She'd get stern looks from her stern coaches.

He was a capitalist, she was a communist.

Can I make it any more obvious?

It was like a Hollywood movie.

Though she hadn't seen many.

American films were banned in her country.

She knew Mouse Mickey, as she called Mickey Mouse in her halting English in a way that would fit right into a Hollywood rom-com.

But she did see a movie with Hal, conspiring to meet and sit in the dark.

They rendezvoused at the zoo, too, saw koalas and kangaroos.

They came separately, arranged to meet up away from the crowds, went back in different rows on the bus, lest Olga get caught by her official government minders.

It was hard for her to explain it all to Hal.

Not just because of the language barrier or the fact that their circumstances were so different,

but because she didn't entirely know what would happen if she were caught.

She was forbidden to fraternize with Americans.

But would she be kicked off the Olympic team?

Would she be sent home?

Would she be jailed?

Would her family face retribution?

She didn't know.

She just knew she was afraid to step out of bounds.

But she did anyway.

Because she had fallen in love.

But she also had a competition to win.

And so to the ring.

Tens of thousands in the crowd.

The first day of the games.

She and Hal skipped the opening ceremonies the night before so they could rest up, but they listened to the parade of nations together on a park bench and his transistor radio.

Olga entered the stadium hoping for the bronze.

There were two Soviet women who were sure to throw farther than her.

Olga was good, but they were great.

The qualifying round that morning was brutal.

Dozens of women entered, but only 13 threw far enough to make it to the finals.

She slipped in with middling scores.

She stepped into the ring for her first real throw right after 3 o'clock.

Cameras clicking.

She took a deep breath, swung her arm back, kicked her right leg forward, spun on her left toe, one, two, three, and off it flew.

She knew it was bad.

Had felt it the whole time, those couple of seconds.

It would not be good enough.

She sat in the grass.

Watched one of the Soviets and her own discus soaring.

She looked out into the crowd.

A sea of faces.

She wondered if all those people knew just how easy it was to fail.

But then she watched the second Soviet champion falter.

Maybe there was an opening.

All she could do was her best.

She crouched, and she spun, and she threw, and off it went, her farthest throw ever.

She was in it again.

And then her final throw, good,

not quite as good, but good enough for a meager lead.

One that would surely fall when the Soviet champion made her last throw.

Olga lay down in the grass.

She couldn't watch.

She listened as the best female discus thrower in the world was called to the circle.

The grass was cool on her back.

She heard sneakers turning on dirt.

And then the crowd cheering.

She didn't realize at first that they were cheering for her.

Hal wasn't there to watch.

Neither of them wanted to psych the other out.

He wasn't there in the evening to see her get her gold medal either, and pose for the cameras, to stand for her national anthem.

The Czechoslovak Athletic Committee members were upset that she didn't sufficiently praise the communist system during her post-ceremony press conference.

In fact, when she was asked by a reporter where she was going the next day, a Sunday, she said she was going to church.

She owed someone a big thank you.

That same Sunday, Hal won his own gold medal.

And on Monday evening, the couple sneaked off to the movies while they watched themselves win gold medals on the big screen in a newsreel.

And the audience recognized them.

They stood and applauded.

And later that night, Olga sneaked off to the American quarters.

Hal had found an empty room where they could spend most of the night together.

He asked her to marry him.

She didn't know how they could, but they were Olympic champions.

If they they announced their love, who could say no?

Her government did.

For a while.

Howell had applied through all the proper channels, had the Secretary of State himself signing off on all the paperwork.

The newspapers followed every twist and turn, every delay and obstacle.

He had asked her to marry him, she said yes.

Now would her government follow suit?

There were weeks of waiting.

of Communist Party apparatchiks putting down their feet, but ultimately they acquiesced.

They told Olga she could have a private family wedding and then slip away on the next flight out.

But when the couple arrived at the church, there were tens of thousands of people there to wish them well.

In the United States, people were enthralled.

The New York Times wrote this, and it is lovely.

This poor old world of ours is quarreling, divided, and perplexed.

The Suez problem is not solved.

The H-bomb overhangs us like a cloud of doom.

The subway during rush hour is almost impossible to endure.

The common cold is still with us.

But Olga and Harold are in love, and the world does not say no to them.

They arrived in New York to a hero's welcome.

They went on the Ed Sullivan show.

Olga was offered mint coats.

The couple was offered a fully furnished apartment, a three-week stay in a suite at the Tropicano Hotel in Las Vegas, all manner of products and services in exchange for their personal endorsements.

But they said no each time.

They didn't want to jeopardize their status as amateur athletes.

Olga had her heart set on competing for Czechoslovakia again.

She loved her home, but that home rejected her.

She became an American citizen in 1960 and would go on to compete for the United States.

in the next four Olympics, though neither she nor Hal would meddle again.

Their lives led them to California, where he got a job teaching at Santa Monica High School.

She raised their kids while training for her next turn and turn in the circle.

She wrote a memoir that came out in 1968, just ahead of the Olympics in Mexico City.

That summer she was elected to carry the flag of the United States in the opening ceremonies.

The American Olympic Committee tried to strip her of the honor.

They didn't like her outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War.

But her teammates weren't having any of it.

The Soviet flag bearer walked the track carrying his flag in one hand, a show of strength in more ways than one.

So Olga did the same thing.

She would say it was the proudest moment of her life.

She and Hal divorced in 1974.

There is no Hollywood ending to their love story.

But it is an American story.

Leading a life of one's choosing as best as one can.

It seems that she chose well again and again.

She raised four children, each of them athletes, loved to watch them compete.

She coached discus and shot put at a college near her California home.

She sold camping equipment for a while.

She organized athletic programs for young children and retired adults, though she herself still worked as a personal trainer at the age of 80.

She died in the spring of 2024 at the age of 91 in hospice care at the home of one one of her sons.

In her memoir, she wrote that she found the United States a restless marvel.

She was one too.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in June of 2024.

This show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw and is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent, artist-owned, listener-supported podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

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