Olga Fikotova Connolly, Olympian in a Cold War Romance, Dies at 91
She was from Czechoslovakia. He was from the U.S. And after meeting at the 1956 Games and winning gold medals, they married. Love had breached the iron curtain.
Olga Fikotova Connolly, who won a gold medal in track and field for Czechoslovakia in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, watched Harold Connolly of the United States win one the next day, and, in March 1957, married him as the highlight of a storybook Cold War romance, died on April 12 in Costa Mesa, Calif. She was 91.
The cause was breast cancer, her daughter Merja Connolly-Freund said. She died in her son Jim’s home, where she had been receiving hospice care, Ms. Connolly-Freund said.
Her competitive record as a discus thrower was exceptional: five Olympic Games (four representing the United States as an American citizen), five American championships and four American records. Harold Connolly, a hammer thrower from Massachusetts, competed in four Olympics.
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But both may be remembered most for their unlikely Olympic romance. As The New York Times recalled in 1972:
“He went to an equipment shed one morning in the Olympic Village to check out a hammer for practice. An attractive woman discus thrower from Czechoslovakia named Olga Fikotova happened to be in the shed at the same time. Four months later, they were married.”
Getting to the point of exchanging vows had not been easy. Officials of Czechoslovakia’s Communist government had refused to allow the wedding to go forward until Antonin Zapotocky, the president, intervened more than three weeks after the couple first sought permission. As Olga Connolly told Radio Prague in 2008, “They were telling me I was a traitor, and that I was running around with an American fascist.”
The couple — she was 24, he was 25 — planned a tiny wedding in Prague, with two former Czech Olympic champions, Emil Zatopek and his wife, Dana Ingrova Zatopkova, as witnesses. But word got out, and a crowd estimated at 25,000 to 30,000 packed the historic Old Town Square to see the couple.
“Somehow, fate brought us together,” Olga Connolly said, “and we found that although we were from opposite or faraway corners of the world, and definitely from political systems that seemed to be completely incompatible, that when it came to basic human values and observations, we were extremely similar.”
The Connollys settled in Southern California, and Olga became a U.S. citizen. She went on to compete in the next four Olympics for the U.S. team — in Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City and Munich — although she did not win any more medals.
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She and her husband had four children, all of them becoming athletes: Mark, a college basketball player and briefly a boxer; Jim, an outstanding decathlete and javelin thrower; and their daughters, Merja, a national team volleyball player, and Nina, a tennis player.
In addition to Merja and Jim, who are twins, she is survived by her two other children, Nina Southard and Mark Connolly, and three grandchildren. From 1959 to the early 2000s, Olga lived in Culver City, Calif. After that, she lived mostly in Costa Mesa.
She had been a medical student while winning gold in the 1956 Olympics, but she never returned to those studies. Instead, after her marriage, when not competing, she worked on environmental causes, became a personal trainer, sold mountaineering goods, lectured at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, coached discus throwers and shot-putters at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, and supervised athletic programs for preschool children and older people.
Olga, along with her husband, also enjoyed a measure of celebrity. She was the mystery guest on an episode of the game show “To Tell the Truth” in 1958, and the couple appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” warmly introduced by Mr. Sullivan and serenaded by Louis Armstrong.
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In 1968, she wrote a book, “The Rings of Destiny,” about her romance with Connolly. And in 1997, when the United States issued a series of postage stamps honoring women who had shaped American history, her image was chosen for a 10-cent stamp.
The marriage didn’t last, however. Separating after 16 years, the Connollys finalized a divorce in 1974. Olga never remarried, but in 1975 Harold married Pat Daniels-Winslow, a track coach and former Olympic 800-meter runner and pentathlete. Their son, Adam, became a nationally ranked hammer thrower. Harold Connolly died in 2010 at 79.
Olga Fikotova was born on Nov. 13, 1932, in Prague. Her father, Frantisek Fikota, was a legionnaire in the Czech Army who became a personal guard of Tomas Masaryk (1850-1937), the first president of Czechoslovakia. As a girl, when visiting her father on the job, Olga would be told to stand erect when President Masaryk passed by on horseback.
After World War II, the family moved to the Czech village of Libis. Olga’s mother, Ludmila (Uhrova) Fikotova, helped support the family as a laborer in a chemical plant.
As a teenager, Olga participated in the Czech program of gymnastic education known as sokol. She discovered that she was a standout athlete.
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At 5 feet 11 inches and 176 pounds, she played on Czechoslovakia’s national teams in basketball and team handball. Two years after she took up the discus, she won the Olympic gold medal with a throw of 53.69 meters (176 feet 1 inch).
Olga Connolly said her proudest athletic moment came during the opening ceremony of the Munich Olympics in 1972, when she carried the American flag into the stadium (one-handed, just as a Soviet heavyweight wrestler had done moments before carrying his flag).
“Stunningly, the captains of all sports within the Olympic delegation elected me to carry the flag during the opening ceremony,” she told The Baltimore Sun in 2004. “But the team’s manager canceled the result” of the election, “reportedly because of my outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam, and held another one. Democracy prevailed. The team elected me again.”
To sports historians, however, she’ll be undoubtedly remembered foremost for the romance that decades earlier had captured the imaginations of a tense world, breaching the iron curtain and becoming front-page news. As The Times wrote the day after the Connollys’ wedding in 1957:
“The H-bomb overhangs us like a cloud of doom. The subway during rush hours is almost impossible to endure. But Olga and Harold are in love, and the world does not say no to them.”
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In a couple of months, we will be saturated with Olympic feel-good stories. That’s a big part of why television networks pay enormous sums for the rights to telecast the Games. They call these vignettes “up close and personal.” In many cases, “overdone and gooey” might be a better description.
Most likely, the Paris Olympics won’t create a yarn as good as the one about Olga Fikotova and Harold Connolly. There was nothing overdone and gooey about their story during the 1956 Games in Melbourne. It was the stuff of international headlines and worldwide emotion, and it is revisited here because Olga died April 12.
She was 91 and was preceded in death 14 years ago by Harold. Both spent much of their lives in and around Los Angeles.
She was 23 when she made the five-day, multi-airplane trip to Australia. She was 5-foot-11 and 180 pounds, not the usual girth for an Olympian, male or female, in a throwing event. She was not among the favorites in the discus and had been a better athlete in basketball than track and field. A track coach had seen her athleticism and felt it would be best served as a discus thrower, despite her small build, and trained her as a rhythm thrower, not a muscle performer. For years, he had her toss the discus in practice to the background music of the Blue Danube Waltz. Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm.
In 1956, the Olympics were, among other things, an East-versus-West faceoff. Sadly, it was more than sports competition. Communist athletes and Western athletes were encouraged to stay separate and compete extra hard against one another. The famous “blood-on-the-water” water polo game between Hungary and the USSR capsulized the intensity of political and nationalistic emotion, even though both teams were part of the Soviet Bloc — Hungary not so willingly. Shortly before the match, the Soviet military had violently shut down the Hungarian Revolution. Emotions and anger poured over into the water polo game and when a Hungarian player left the pool with blood streaming down his face. The headline for the game was easy: Blood on the Water. Hungary won the game 4-0.
Olga’s Czechoslovakia was part of the Soviet bloc, but she was the only member of her team who had refused to sign on with the Communist party. In retrospect, that was classic Olga.
Once she got to Melbourne, Olga received much attention and technical help from better-known and bigger-medal prospects from Russia. They assumed she was one of them. Her discus competition was among the first in the Games, and when she got off her gold-medal toss of 176 feet and 1 inch, the Russians who had helped her, had to settle for the silver and bronze. Her winning toss was seven feet farther than her previous best.
She was celebrated in the Soviet bloc and it turned out that her gold was the only one taken in Melbourne by Czechoslovakia. She was a hero in her home country, until she wasn’t.
She told the story later about the immediate aftermath of her victory.
“I had a terrible blister on my foot and I had to compete in practice shoes,” she said. “Then, as soon as I was done competing, they took me off for surgery. My team went to the ocean in Australia, such a beautiful sight, and I had to sit on the beach while they went in the water. I had been told by my doctor to stay out of the water because of my foot. But as I sat there, an old man came up to me. I told him why I was sitting on the beach and not in the water. He said that was wrong and convinced me to go in. I did, and the next day, my foot was almost half healed.”
Somewhere between winning a gold medal, having surgery and going to the beach, Olga wandered into an equipment shed used by the discus, shot put, javelin and hammer competitors. Mingling with competitors from the West, especially male ones, was discouraged. But as would become evident soon, and for the rest of her life, Olga was never much of a click-her-heels and salute person.
So, there she was, in the equipment shed, and there was this husky American, Harold Connolly. And the rest became history, an Olympic story of Olympic proportions.
They fell in love. Harold won the hammer throw the day after Olga’s discus triumph, so they each had a gold medal and time on their hands. They danced the nights away in an Olympic Village where East and West mingling was discouraged and was mostly ignored by 20- to 25-year-olds. Somehow, worlds apart, they communicated, according to Olga “with my fragmented English and Harold’s fragmented German.”
There were pictures and stories and the whole world soon knew. The official stance in Czechoslovakia was that Olga had brought “50% honor to her country and 50% shame for taking up with “an American Facist.”
Harold proposed, Olga wished to get married in her home country and permission was granted when Czech Olympic legends Emil Zatopek and his wife, Dana Zatopkova, were listed as wedding witnesses. Zatopek had won three gold medals in distance races and Zatopkova had won agold in javelin, as well as many European competitions. Nobody said no to that superstar pair.
Olga had hoped for a small wedding in the Old Town Square in Prague. En route, her car was slowed many times and she thought there had been an accident. When she finally arrived, the center of Prague was packed. Estimates ran from 25,000 to 40,000 people, there to see her marry the handsome “American Facist.” Olympic columnist Randy Harvey, in an L.A. Times story in 1989, cited a New York Times’ editorial the day after the wedding, that read: “The H-Bomb overhangs us like a cloud of doom. The subway during rush hour is almost impossible to endure. But Olga and Harold are in love, and the world does not say no to them.”
The Connollys were immensely popular and immensely poor. After the wedding, Harold sold his hammer-throwing equipment to earn them enough to fly home. When they landed in Boston, near Harold’s home, they had 35 cents to their name and jobs were crucial. For a while, Olga cleaned the offices at the Boston Globe.
They eventually moved to Southern California. Olga, who had wanted to continue to compete for her home country, was not allowed to and ended up making four more Olympic teams for the United States. In her last Olympics, the Munich Games in 1972, she was elected to carry the flag at opening ceremonies. The U.S. team officials didn’t like that choice. Olga had been very clear and typically very loud about her anti-Vietnam War sentiments. The team officials asked for another team vote. The result was the same. Olga led the U.S. team into the stadium. Afterward, one of the U.S. officials praised her for the way she led her team in.
“I learned how to march in Czechoslovakia,” she replied, sarcastically.
Olga and Harold were married for 17 years. They had four children, Jimmy, Merja, Nina and Mark. Jimmy was a national college decathlon champion, Merja a world-class volleyball player and Mark a Golden Gloves boxer in Las Vegas. After Olga and Harold divorced, Olga told Harvey in a Times article that what they had as a couple was wonderful, but maybe not true love. She had wanted to move on. Harold set nine more world records in the hammer throw after they were married. They remained good friends and she stayed cordial with Harold’s new wife, Pat Daniels, who participated in three Olympics herself and became, as Pat Connolly, sprinter Evelyn Ashford’s coach.
Olga championed, many causes around Los Angeles. She was an advocate for fitness and proper nutrition. She worked for a time at a home for the elderly. She fought for literacy programs and wrote many letters to The Times, seeking publication after marching into the sports editor’s office to discuss her views. She was opinionated, sometimes off-putting, but never lacking passion or empathy.
She was fond of calling Melbourne “My Olympics,” and said, “All that was on my mind was to do something good for the Czech people. I wanted to do it for the streetcar driver who told me I didn’t have to pay when I got on, or the man at the newsstand who gave me a paper in the morning and said I didn’t have to pay.”
In her later years, Olga joked about what the Olympics had become. She laughed and said that the Games started in Greece with everybody training and competing naked, so that everybody was equal. “Now, they make everybody go through metal detectors.”
If TV tells the story of Olga Connolly this summer, it probably won’t use that quote.
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A New Love Story : Olga Connolly, Once the World’s Darling, Is Giving Something Back
There was no shortage of drama at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia.
Five countries boycotted, either because of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary or the tension in the Middle East over the Suez Canal. Hungarian athletes hauled down their flag in the Olympic Village and tore off the Communist emblem. A water polo encounter between the Soviets and Hungarians had to be stopped because of violence.
Yet, if a movie were made about the 1956 Summer Games, it might well be a romance. Adding a touch of warmth to the Cold War, an American hammer thrower, Harold Connolly, and a Czechoslovakian discus thrower, Olga Fikotova, both gold medalists, met in the Olympic village and became infatuated.
The world was captivated by their story, so much so that the Czech government, despite its objections, could not resist when the dashing Harold charged into Prague a year later, married Olga and carried her back to the United States with him.
The day after the wedding, The New York Times editorialized: “The H-bomb overhangs us like a cloud of doom. The subway during rush hours is almost impossible to endure. But Olga and Harold are in love, and the world does not say no to them.”
This, of course, is when the credits begin to roll.
But life goes on.
The Connollys were married for 16 years and had four children before their divorce in 1973.
Harold, 57, who is now married to another Olympian, the former Pat Daniels, recently left his position as assistant principal at Santa Monica High School and moved to Washington, where he works for the Special Olympics.
Olga, 56, who has not remarried, still lives in Culver City in the last house that she shared with Harold.
Olga, Harold and Pat occasionally are invited to functions, where invariably someone refers to Pat as Olga, and the love story becomes one of the main topics of conversation, embarrassing all three.
“We don’t want to hear all this nonsense about an Olympic romance,” Olga said last week at her home. She was suffering from the beginning stages of laryngitis, but she declined an offer to postpone the interview. She has so much to say. And to write. And to do.
She said that she would rather be remembered as a five-time Olympian, all but the first as a discus thrower for the United States, and as the U.S. flag bearer during the opening ceremony for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.
Her teammates elected her to carry the flag over the protests of U.S. Olympic Committee officials, who had considered removing her from the team because of her outspokenness until Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) came to her defense.
The issue of the day then was the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which she opposed. In a New York Times interview, she called upon Richard Nixon to cease the bombing during the Olympics.
After the opening ceremony, a USOC official sarcastically congratulated her for doing such a perfect job of carrying the flag despite her anti-war views.
“In Czechoslovakia, I learned to march,” she said.
Causes have changed, but she has not.
She is a feminist and an environmentalist who also speaks passionately about animal rights and youth development. For much of her post-competitive life, she has been involved in the latter as a social worker for various agencies.
Since social work does not pay significantly better than discus throwing, she also tried temporary secretarial work, which indeed was temporary in her case.
“I’m such a lousy typist,” she said. “I have a talent for changing things. I’d work for a place for a couple of days, and I’d be saying that they should do things differently. They didn’t want to do things differently. They just wanted me to type a letter without a mistake.”
In her living room are pictures of her children. Also prominently displayed are some of their athletic awards. Three of the children are actively involved in sports: Mark, 28, as a Golden Gloves boxer in Nevada; Jim, 25, as a decathlete in Los Angeles and Mereja, 25, as a professional volleyball player in Italy.
Another daughter, Nina, 22, a talented singer, married just out of high school and provided Olga with the joy of her life, a grandson, now 2.
But there is only a single picture of Olga on the wall. Wearing Jim’s U.S. track uniform, she could pass for one of his teammates in the picture. At 5 feet 11 inches and 138 pounds, she still appears athletic.
She has her arm around a proud young boy. Earlier, he had been despondent after losing in a 100-yard race. But when Connolly discovered that his shoes were too large, preventing him from getting a good start, she arranged for him to have a new pair of sneakers and persuaded the organizers to allow him to run the 440, which he won.
Today, Connolly is the supervisor of preschool and senior citizen programs at San Pedro’s Toberman Settlement House, which is funded largely by the United Methodist Church and United Way. Issues affecting seniors are relatively new to her, but she has adopted them as vigorously as her other causes.
She said that on the first field trip after she joined Toberman, she took the senior citizens to a club to see comedy and magic acts.
“Their previous field trips had been to do things like getting their blood pressure checked,” she said. “I thought that was a little uninspiring. I wanted to make them feel alive.
“Senior citizens have been stereotyped as feeble and dependent by commercial and other interests who offer them services. Of course, there are seniors who are ill and incapacitated, just as there are ill and incapacitated young people and middle-aged people.
“But nearly all of the mail I get on my desk is literature about convalescent homes or preparation for funerals. I’m not saying these services aren’t useful, but seeing this sort of thing becomes a daily routine for seniors, and it beats them down.
“The group I work with is a hell of a tough group. I’m their supervisor, but I wouldn’t dream of telling them what to do. If they need a consultant, I’m here. I respect these people. “As a society, we will begin recovering when we start respecting the knowledge of the people who have retired after working their butts off all their lives and now have something to say. This second childhood stuff, that’s nonsense. We should treat them as senior officers.”
After returning home from a day of work in San Pedro, Connolly often writes. She sometimes begins at midnight and does not stop until 6 a.m.
She has written one book, “Rings of Destiny,” which is about the 1956 Summer Olympics and her romance with Harold, and she co-wrote another with Harold about Finland, where they lived for a while in the early 1960s.
She has written essays on various topics, including fishing. Most of her work that has been published in newspapers is about the Olympics. She is concerned for the movement, arguing that it has sold out its ideals to politics and commercialism.
For example, she told the story of her first meeting with the Soviet Union’s Nina Ponomaryeva, who won the discus competition at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki.
Having become a discus thrower after spending her formative years as a basketball and team handball player in Czechoslovakia, Olga, 22 at the time, competed in her first international track and field meet in 1955 in Poland. Out of 28 throwers, she finished 28th.
While working out the next day, she was approached by Ponomaryeva.
“One thing wrong is that you are too skinny,” Ponomaryeva told her. “You really don’t know what you’re doing.”
Ponomaryeva volunteered to work with her. Sharing the techniques she learned from her coaches in the Soviet Union, she gave Connolly the foundation that she was lacking.
“She told me that if I followed her advice, she would see me the next year in Melbourne,” Connolly said.
Indeed, she did. Connolly won the gold medal in Melbourne. Ponomaryeva finished third.
“That wouldn’t happen today because of the money in track and field,” Connolly said. “If you told someone your secrets, they might win and take money away from you. There’s been a loss of cooperation.”
So Ponomaryeva took it well when Connolly beat her?
“No,” Connolly said, laughing. “She was mad as hell.”
Three weeks later, as Soviet and Czech athletes shared a train across Europe, Connolly caught a bad cold. Ponomaryeva heard about it and brought her a potion that she insisted would cure colds.
“It tasted awful,” Connolly said. “It was so bad that I got better so that she would quit bringing it to me. But we became very good friends.”
Years later, Harold and Olga named their youngest daughter after Ponomaryeva and another woman named Nina from Czechoslovakia.
Although it would have been a good human interest story for reporters, the friendship between Connolly and Ponomaryeva was submerged amid the worldwide publicity generated by Harold’s courtship of Olga. Sean Penn and Madonna were hermits by comparison.
“It was a great romance, a great infatuation that grew,” Olga said. “But I’m not sure if it was true love.
“I was the first Olympic champion that year in track and field, and Harold won his gold medal on the second day. I was definitely not the stereotype of the Eastern Bloc woman athlete that he imagined. Harold was enchanted by that. And I felt that the Americans had such freedom. Everybody was being such an individual. I was a person like that, and that appealed to me very much.
“The Czechs made such a big thing of it by criticizing me for the romance. They wanted us to end it, and that made me angry. So now there was a little rebellion in it. It was very romantic.”
But the romance did not last. After several years of marriage, Connolly said that she realized that she and her husband had grown apart.
“I never had any intention of going to five Olympic Games,” she said. “I wasn’t that committed to it. But Harold truly loved athletics. He was basically married to the hammer. He broke nine world records after we got married.
“We went through 16 years of marriage because of mutual respect and camaraderie. But we had different interests. Eighty out of 100 people in our situation might have stayed together, but to really be in love is a very rare thing. When you really are in love with somebody, they totally and inescapably become part of you.”
She said that she has remained friends with Harold and his wife, Pat, and that they talk occasionally on the telephone, mostly about athletics. Pat has coached several world-class athletes, including Evelyn Ashford.
“When Pat and Harold met, they found real love,” Connolly said. “They have a wonderful life and a wonderful love. They are one together. Harold and I were two.”
Asked if she had ever found true love, Connolly said that she had.
“But it didn’t work out,” she said.
She did not seem sad when she talked about it. After all, she has her children, her grandson and an entire world that needs her care.
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