Eva Samková Adamczyková

At the beginning of 2018, I was traveling to Turkey for the FIS Snowboard World Cup. Just getting there was difficult; it took about 30 hours. First, our plane was delayed, and then it couldn’t land where it was supposed to land so we had to take a bus to Erzurum and that took about nine hours.

I had decided to attend this competition even though I had already qualified for the Olympics. It’s good to stay sharp, but at the same time, I asked my mom if I should stay at home, where I had already spent more time than before. I wanted to make sure they could manage without me.

She told me to go.

It was pretty bad weather in Turkey after our arrival. After one training session, I went to bed early and set my phone to quiet mode, as I always do for the night. That’s why I missed an incoming call. Eventually, somebody knocked on my door. It was our coach. I could see something was wrong.

“Your mom called,” the coach said. “Call her back.”

I knew it involved dad. I just didn’t want to admit it.

Two days after winning a gold medal at the Olympics in Sochi I came home to the Czech Republic with a TV station waiting to document my return to Vrchlabí, and my reunion with my parents.

When I stopped the car in front of our house with its wild front garden, there were already excited reporters, and a camera. They were hoping for the Hollywood-like arrival of a supergirl full of joy and ready to jump right into the arms of her proud father who would then spin in circles with her. And then her mother, with tears in her eyes, would fall around her neck.

The front door opened and my father stood in front of me in his house clothing and slippers, unshaven. 

“Heeey,” he said.
“Hiii,” I said. 
“So it was good?” he asked
“Yeah, good.” I said with a smile.

My mom was not there. She was at work.

The TV people just stood there with their mouths open.

“That’s all,” I said.
“What did you think was gonna happen?”

And then they left. This scene perfectly illustrates my family. No American emotion or I love yous. We always made fun of that. We loved each other, of course, but we didn’t need to say it out loud. My parents were glad that I was so good at my sport and had been so successful, but it had become a sort of standard. I could win the Olympics, World Cups or whatever and my mom would still tell me: “Better slow down a little, you don’t always have to be the first one.” 

Just as we Sameks are rational about our successes, we’re also rational about our problems. We don’t enjoy drama. There are families that always deal with drama but we’re more of a chill family.

Of course, the Sochi Olympics were a big deal for my parents. They had invited friends over, had a barrel of beer, and even let the TV staff into their living room. After the race, my sister and father did an interview. You could see my sister was nervous, saying how I’ve always been very responsible and followed my goals, but my father knew exactly what he wanted to say.

“Our Eva?” he said, smiling. “She did every sport she could ever since she was born. Any sport, you name it. She did horse riding, yachting…”

Yachting? Really dad? I’ve been on a yacht probably once in my life during our family vacation, but my dad always made fun of everyone and everything, at any time. Maybe he should have noted how thanks to him, I ended up in a river with a burned leg, twice. Instead of vacations on the seashore, we went rock climbing or camping and riding down a river. That’s where my mom once accidentally poured boiling soup on me when I was 5. My mom has problems seeing out of one side and as I was jumping around her, she tripped over me and poured the soup on my shin. 

My father carried me five kilometers to the nearest hospital before I realized it didn’t hurt that much and I started jumping around once again. The doctor treated me and told me to return the next day for a fresh bandage. My parents said that we couldn’t do that, since we’d be continuing down the river.

Alright then, take her to another hospital, it doesn’t matter, just make sure the wound doesn’t get wet, the doctor said. In the morning, we flipped our canoe upside down. Twice. In that classic Czech brown river. We didn’t follow the doctor’s orders.

To understand how it happened, imagine my parents arguing about what “contra” means right in front of a dam. My dad got so invested in explaining it that he let go of the canoe in which I was sitting and it slowly started to float away with me in it.

The weir was pretty big, so the flow of water pushed me right under it. When they finally got me out and caught all of our things I was hysterical, crying. At first, they thought it was my leg again, but I had just lost my favorite little plastic paddle.

My mom said she’d never sit in the same canoe as my dad so we moved to a different one with our friends. Two hundred meters after the switch, someone crashed into us and we both ended up in the water. My leg survived.

My dad once crashed into a stone in the middle of the river Berounka. He saw it, but he just kept believing that he had plenty of time to turn until he had none. It was he who always told me that women can’t judge distances. The belief stayed with me so much that I used it as an excuse with my coach, Marek Jelínek, whenever we discussed an upcoming race.

“You’ll feel it,” he told me when I asked how I was supposed to jump in a certain passage.
“No, I won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because my dad says that women can’t feel this.”

Fortunately, Jelen managed to persuade me that I actually have a pretty good sense for distances, and I actually see it in driving. My dad was always an amazing driver and I take after him. He explained everything to me when I was too little to have a driving license. He would let me drive in parking lots, and then he took me to a driving school. The roads we have explored together on a motorbike!

Every weekend, he would go out for adventures with his Suzuki Bandit 400, alone at first, then he would take me with him. He had professional motorbike gear, proper clothes, and a helmet because he had had a few accidents. Nothing major, he would just slip and lay down on the road. But I had nothing. I would ride with him in just some old pants and a jacket and my head was protected with some old helmet. Whenever we were going fast downhill it would float above my head.

Once he tried to test the speed of it. We could’ve been riding like 150 kilometers per hour and it was the coolest thing ever.

“Just don’t tell mom,” he told me after this stunt, as he usually told me after any of our adventures. We used to go to the Jizera Mountains for good asphalt and especially the serpentines there. We would take a break somewhere, eat some snacks like a biscuit or an ice cream, and go back home. 

It’s such a shame I will never get to do this with him again.