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O Mount Everest Czech!
Success vast and progress high
Your soul was Heaven's beaming smile.
Teeming world records in a beaming deck.
In endurance-life, Everest-Tower.
Breathless interval training-pioneer,
Your flower-heart has blossomed in every clime.
Around you cosmos-joys throng.
Helsinki Olympics gold medal winner
World's surprise-attention you drew.
Perfect oneness-joy-satisfaction free.
But one learns more from defeats than laurels.
— Emil Zatopek— Cordner Nelson
"He ran as if tortured by internal demons."
— Kenny Moore
"He ran every step of a race as if there was a scorpion in each shoe."
— William Johnson
"He runs like a man wasting no time getting out of a graveyard at the witches' hour with blood on the moon."
— Allison Danzig
"Witnesses ... still wake up screaming in the dark when Emil the Terrible goes writhing through their dreams, clawing at his abdomen in horrible extremities of pain."
— Red Smith
Zatopek had many critics, but he ultimately silenced the proud criticism of them all.
He runs like a man who has just been stabbed in the heart.
— European coachMimoun describes Zatopek's reaction: "Emil turned and looked at me as if he were waking from a dream. Then he snapped to attention. Emil took off his cap — that white painting cap he wore so much — and he saluted me. Then he embraced me."
Alain Mimoun sheds tears when he speaks of it. "Oh, for me," he said, "that was better than the medal."
Then Mimoun informed Zatopek that he had more good news for his friend. Mimoun had two days earlier become the proud father of a baby boy.When the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, Zatopek was a supporter of Alexander Dubcek. His loyalty to Dubcek was incredible. After the invasion, the Russians expelled him from the Czech army, in which he had held the rank of colonel.
From being a colonel, he had to take the job of a garbage collector in Prague. He suffered the excruciating pangs of humiliation, but cheerfully he went through it. Because he was a man of such principle, his friends and admirers became closer to him. Some kind-hearted men even helped him in his new job. He did a few more menial jobs, but indomitable was his spirit. Cheerful was his life. He braved the storms of life smilingly and thus triumphed in the battlefield of real life.From:Sri Chinmoy,Emil Zatopek: earth's tearing cry and Heaven's beaming smile, Agni Press, 1980
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/ez