While Katie won eight of them so far, Věra Čáslavská won seven gold medals at the Olympics in Tokyo and Mexico. And thanks to this, at the time when she was at the peak of her sports career, she became the most famous woman in the world. The only person who could compete with her in terms of public favor was the iconic American first lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
The fact that Věra Čáslavská was incredibly popular abroad is evidenced, among other things, by her marriage to the athlete Josef Odložil. It was held after her next Olympic triumph in October 1968 in the cathedral in Mexico City. A crowd of hundreds of thousands gathered in the nearby El Zócalo square, which, like the cathedral itself, is one of the largest in the world, almost trampled the wedding guests.
Therefore, the newlyweds had to run away from the wedding and hide in the TV car. At the same time, it is a paradox that both originally wanted to have a small wedding, taking place among friends in the Olympic village. But when word spread that the adored Věra was getting married, everything turned out differently. “The Mexicans did not accept at all that it would be somewhere where everyone could not fit, so they chose the largest cathedral in the world,” Čáslavská recalled in Olga Sommerová’s documentary Věra 68.
She also recalled that even the Mexican press described her wedding as God’s permission. The footage, which appeared in the documentary, shows huge streams of people pouring in, with some onlookers not even hesitating to climb the altar and the organ. “It was incredible, everyone wanted to be as close as possible and everyone to grab something,” Věra described the atmosphere in the cathedral, where she returned after many years for filming. By the way, she lost the buttons from her beautiful wedding dress.
Therefore, our Olympians, among whom there were also muscular weightlifters, tried to protect her, they held hands and formed a circle around Věra and Josef so that the wedding ceremony could take place at all. “I know I didn’t hear a single word, I remembered. “And not even the married ten. Maybe our marriage would have ended better,” she lamented. Nevertheless, in the end, although not very harmonious, it lasted more than twenty years.
Source: Věra 68 (directed by Olga Sommerová)
