Olga Fikotová, Czech discus thrower who had a Cold War romance with a US hammer thrower – obituary

Olga Fikotová-Connolly, who has died aged 91, was a discus thrower who won Olympic gold for Czechoslovakia in 1956 but came into conflict with her country’s Communist apparatchiks, who branded her a traitor when she fell in love with an American hammer thrower; she was forbidden from representing Czechoslovakia and had to compete in the next four Games for her new husband’s country, eventually carrying the Stars and Stripes into the stadium at the 1972 Olympic opening ceremony.

Olga Fikotová was born in the city of Most, 50 miles north-west of Prague, on November 13 1932, and went on to study medicine, intending to go into orthopaedics; a talented athlete from a young age, she represented her country at basketball and handball before switching to the discus after winning a silver medal at the 1954 European Women’s Basketball Championship in Belgrade.

Her expertise in those two sports gave her a grounding of sorts when she switched. “Both handball, where I was a goalie, and basketball itself, are both very, very movement-oriented sports,” she recalled. “So already, I believe, I had a great deal of neuro-muscular co-ordination and pathways developed.”

Her coach, the venerable Otakar Jandera, told her that all she needed to do was to perfect her throwing technique, “and catch the rhythm of it. He started off by playing the Blue Danube over and over again on the stadium loudspeakers and had me making turns.”

Only two years after taking up the discus she was at the Olympic Games in Melbourne – and on the day before the start of competition, in the Olympic Village, she bumped into Harold “Hal” Connolly, who was going into the Games having just broken the world hammer record. They immediately got on well, despite the Soviet-bloc diktat forbidding their competitors from fraternising with the Americans.

“We were trying to converse in my very fragmented English, and his fragmented German, because he’d travelled in Germany before,” she recalled. “We were kind of putting together ideas and views and we were surprisingly close together. From that developed, besides curiosity and friendship, also a feeling of love.”

In the discus final she traded blows with two Soviet throwers, Nina Ponomareva – who had become a mentor to her after the pair had met at Olga’s first discus event – and Irina Beglyakova; the latter broke the former’s four-year-old world record in the first round, but in the fifth round Olga Fikotová threw a sensational 53.69 metres, more than a metre past her rivals’ efforts, to take gold (Ponomareva was “mad as hell”, said Olga). The following day Hal Connolly won the men’s hammer with an Olympic-record throw.

Their romance flourished, but when Olga applied for permission to marry a foreigner, she recalled, “the various representatives were telling me that I was a traitor and that I was running around with an American fascist.”

Her efforts seemed doomed until the long-distance runner Emil Zátopek, a national hero, had a word with the country’s president Antonín Zápotocký at a sports congress. He agreed to meet Olga, and a few days later she received the permit.

They were married in Prague; Olga’s teammates, the married couple Zátopek and Dana Zátopková, were their witnesses, and though they were hoping for a quiet affair, tens of thousands of well-wishers crowded the Old Town Square.

The following day The New York Times wrote: “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.”

Olga was also given a permit to move to the US with Hal – they were so broke that he had to sell a hammer to pay for the boat fare to New York – but despite her entreaties the Czech Olympic committee was adamant that if she was not training at home she would not be able to represent her country – “I was crushed” – and spread the word that she had in fact refused to do so. Soon afterwards she met a group of Czech athletes in Rome who turned their backs on her.

Making a new home in the US, she competed as Olga Connolly in the next four Olympics, finishing seventh in 1960 and sixth in 1968, as well as winning five national titles. She retired in the late 1960s, but returned in 1972, twice breaking the US discus record at the age of 39. Her fellow athletes voted her in as the person to lead the American contingent into the Olympic Stadium at the Games in Munich, despite official opposition to her outspokenness on the subject of the Vietnam War.

In 1968 she published The Rings of Destiny about the love story between her and Hal, but they divorced in 1975.

In retirement she became a passionate environmentalist and animal-rights campaigner, while working as a fitness trainer. She was an exercise therapist at the University of California at Irvine until 2017, but refiused to retire and moved to Las Vegas to work at a fitness club.

“For me, competing in the Olympics was wonderful,” she said in 2015. “I was extremely fortunate to realise that the world is really one big family of humans.”

Olga Fikotová and Hal Connolly had four children: one of their sons became a college decathlon champion and another a Golden Gloves boxer, while a daughter played volleyball for the US.

Olga Fikotová-Connolly, born November 13 1932, died April 12 2024