Vladimír Vůjtek

The whole country was celebrating, and I was crying. In the middle of the biggest euphoria, I disappeared from the crowd into my office and closed the door behind me.

On the other side of the world, the scoreboard was counting down the last seconds of the Nagano final against Russia, and Robert Záruba shouted that famous sentence about rewriting history. At that moment, I was filled with mixed emotions no one else could experience. It took me a few minutes to get it back together.

We watched the most memorable tournament of our hockey history in my pub in Klimkovice and it was always crowded. Although the games started very early in the morning, people carried chairs from their homes to be able to sit. No one was working too hard those days.

There were lots of cheers, chanting, and when the boys won a game, we celebrated in style.

However, knowing that a week before the start of the Olympic Games in Nagano, I was also on the roster with all of these players that everyone in our country now worshipped, it was hard. When Pavel Patera won the faceoff before Petr Svoboda's golden goal, it could have been me who was the first to jump on him with joy.

Fate had a different plan for me.