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The Czech team at the Winter Olympic Games in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo will have 113 athletes. Its composition was approved by the plenum of the Czech Olympic Committee on Thursday. It is the same number that took part in the record-breaking Winter Games in Beijing in 2022. Although 116 Olympians were finally nominated there, some did not participate in the competitions due to injuries and the coronavirus. The number of nominees from Thursday’s plenary session may change slightly after a possible further redistribution of quotas.
For the second time in a row, there are more than a hundred athletes in the Czech team for the Winter Olympics. This is mainly helped by the participation of both hockey teams, which together make up 48 players. The expedition is thus slightly larger than at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, where there were 111 Czech athletes.
“It was a fight for places until the last moment, but in the end we have the same big expedition as last time. It’s great that we have both hockey teams, as well as two curling teams. It’s a shame that the bobsledders, who have always been a traditional part of the team, failed to qualify,” said expedition leader Martin Doktor.
Czech bobsledders will be absent from the Olympics for the first time in the history of the independent Czech Republic. From Albertville 1992 to Beijing 2022, they started continuously. “It’s a shame, because the bobsledders are a nice group of guys and they have always been an asset to the Olympic team,” regretted the Doctor in an interview with journalists.
Czech colors will be represented by a quartet of Olympic medalists – speed skater Martina Sáblíková, skier and snowboarder Ester Ledecká, snowboard crosser Eva Adamczyková and biathlete Michal Krčmář.
Speed skater Sáblíková will be at the Olympics for the sixth time, and twenty years after her debut in Turin, she is preparing to say goodbye to the Olympic scene that brought her seven medals, including three gold. On the other hand, the premiere under the five rings awaits 19-year-old Metoděj Jílek, who won the 5,000 and 10,000 meter races this World Cup season and fit the role of one of the favorites. Nikola Zdráhalová will go to the Olympics as a two-time medalist from the recent EC.
Three-time Olympic champion Ledecká is again preparing to compete in downhill skiing and alpine snowboarding. On the board, in the parallel giant slalom, he will attack for the third Olympic gold in a row, even if due to a deadline conflict, he will lose the downhill ski event. In skiing, she will compete in the super giant slalom, which she sensationally won in PyeongChang 2018.
Hockey players from the NHL are participating in the men’s hockey tournament for the first time since Sochi 2014. The Czech national team with nineteen gold medalists from last year’s world championships in Prague will also want to assert themselves in extremely high-quality competition. The hockey players who won bronze at the World Championships in 2022 and 2023 and finished fourth at the last two world championships are also not without a chance for a medal.
The Olympic premiere awaits 68 members of the team. The youngest athlete of the Czech team is the eighteen-year-old ski crosser Lucie Krausová. On the contrary, the oldest is forty-eight-year-old curler Radek Boháč. The athletes will be joined by 182 members of the entourage, including five representatives of the WWTP management.
At the last Olympic Games in Beijing, the Czech team won two medals – the snowboarding gold of Ledecka and the bronze of the speed skater Sáblíková in the 5000 meters. As usual, the Doctor was reluctant to get involved in estimating the number of Czech medals at the Games in Italy. “According to the advice of my predecessor František Dvořák, I calculated how much we could theoretically hope for medals and then divided it by three. And I thought that it could be somewhere between the result from Beijing and five medals. So we’ll see,” he said.
The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is scheduled for February 6. Competitions will start two days earlier, including for Czech curlers Julia Zelingrová and Vít Chabičovský. The Olympics will end on February 22.
