Athletes: The Apartheid Of The 50s

In practice, the “shamateur” status (widely used in the world-wide Olympic discourse) was combined with the socialist nationalised economy to give birth to the “state amateurs” (a term not used officially, of course) (Jakubcová 2012; Stloukalová 2008). As of the 50s, a sort of top-level athletes evolved in the Czechoslovakia who, while still being employed, had special reliefs from their employers. First, they could use 8 hours of their week workload for training, which were fully refunded to them. Later, as of 1956, they could have used up to 16 hours. But it must be remembered that most of those jobs were fake, fictitious, and that, actually, athletes’ training was a full time process, comparable to the training of any other sporting professional