Less than Zdeněk Haněk's draw.
Motto: Zdeněk Haník, 30.4.2018 - "My current challenge is to spread awareness" (Zdeněk Haník's blog High Game - Strong Personality)
The Nymburk Sports Complex is where the Czech women's curling team regularly prepares for a demanding season that will include hundreds of hours of on-ice training, a lot of time spent in the gym and in physiotherapy, nearly a hundred games played in nine months, and more than two months away from home in total. Every day at the facility, the women walk several times through the hallway leading from the hotel area to the main entrance. Five of the best Czech curlers, mostly students who had to add working in a laboratory, a café or an accounting firm to their curling and studies, regularly pass collages hanging opposite the windows depicting some of our famous athletes and coaches. There are representatives from individual and team sports, and their stories serve as inspiration and motivation for those who have yet to aspire to the highest levels. Among them is Zdeněk Haník, a prominent Czech volleyball player, coach and official of the Czech Olympic Committee. However, the way he perceives the sporting environment and especially women's sport is striking and surprising. In an article for the Reflex magazine on 25 April, Zdeněk Haník, as the vice-chairman of the Czech Olympic Committee, expresses himself in a seemingly awkward but essentially quite pejorative and insulting way about women who have sporting ambitions and the desire to succeed in sport. However, the well-known clichés used about the roles of men and women divided by tradition and logic have nothing to do with the issue of the right to play sport. Hanik's philosophising contradicts two articles of the Olympic Charter, namely Article 4, which states that 'Every individual must be able to practise sport without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding in a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair-play.' However, the COC vice-president belittles this by claiming that women are supposed to keep the home fireside smiling and loving, and furthermore, they supposedly like competing less than men and prefer a draw (sic!) instead of winning. Later in the article, he directly confesses his disdain for women's sport, and revelatorily points out that "women's biological clocks tick differently". The sixth article of the Olympic Charter, whose mission the COC leadership represents for Czech sportsmen and women ("Any form of discrimination against a country or a person on the grounds of race, religion, political conviction, gender or any other reason is incompatible with membership in the Olympic Movement.") is in direct contradiction to many of the other statements in the article. It is difficult to understand what prompted Hanik to publish such a controversial text. If he was driven by a desire to trump Gabriela Koukalova in the competition for the most scandalous insight into the sporting environment, he almost succeeded.
The author of this text has coached adult, junior and collegiate women's curling teams for over fifteen years.