PRAGUE – Eva Romanová-Grahamová, a former figure skating star, lived to her 80th birthday on January 27.
He and his brother Pavlo became world champions in ice dancing four times, and later performed together in the American revue Holiday on Ice. After his tragic death in 1972, she hung up her skates and gradually raised horses with her British husband, ran a retirement home, took care of a poultry farm, traveled America in a camper van, and improved a farm in Pilsen.
“Traveling was so amazing that I wouldn’t trade it for any medal,” Romanová recalled one of the chapters in her life when she and her husband commuted between the farm in Pilsen and England. Even after Graham’s death ten years ago, Eva lives in the British Isles, but regularly visits her native land.
The Romanov siblings were extremely popular in the first half of the 1960s, from Aš to Košice they were called “our children”. They won their first world championship title in 1962 in Prague, when Pavel was 19 and Eva 16 years old. They did not find defeaters even in the next three championships, in the meantime they also won two European gold medals.
The natives of Olomouc were introduced to figure skating by their father, who prescribed their training sessions depending on when and where there was free ice. “He wouldn’t stand it if we were slacking off. So in the winter we skated, in the summer we played tennis and swam, even in Prague, where we moved. However, because of sports, we hardly had any friends, we didn’t go to the cinema. We didn’t have time for that.” described Eva.
Originally they started as a sports couple, they first tried dancing in 1958. For a while they did both disciplines, but when they placed better in dancing at the 1959 EC in Davos, they stayed with them. At their father’s request, the famous coach Míla Nováková took them in charge, who set them up with precise step variations.
After the fourth world championship title in 1965, the Romanovs could officially go to one of the American revues. In order to be able to see their parents, who, with a few exceptions, could not travel to see them, they chose Holiday on Ice, which performed once every two years in Prague. “We’d rather end up at the top. We could only go downhill now,” explained Eva’s unusually early departure from the amateur ice.
After six years in the revue, they parted ways. While Eva married the English figure skating comedian Jack Graham, with whom she also performed on the ice, Pavel, a lover of fast cars, died shortly after at the age of only 29 in a car accident. “Our sibling relationship was exceptional. It was hard work, but at the same time beautiful years,” she said.
The Grahams bought a farm in England and started farming, later exchanging it for Admiral Nelson’s former residence and turning it into a retirement home. After ten years, they sold it and moved to Texas, where they ran a goose and duck farm. Then they got a camper van and cruised America with it for four years. At the beginning of the millennium, they improved a farm in Lipnice near Rokycany, after the death of Eva’s mother in 2005, they settled permanently in England.
The animal, painting and travel lover hasn’t been standing on her skates for over 40 years, instead riding inline skates. “It’s dangerous on the ice. At least you have a helmet, knee and elbow protectors on inline skates, so when an injury happens, it’s not so tragic. I try to do sports as much as possible. The older a person is, the more they have to move,” said Romanová-Grahamová during her visit to Prague the year before last.
The recipient of the State Medal for Merit is also a frequent guest of the Pavel Roman Memorial for dance couples in her native Olomouc.
- Author: © List/
- Source: CTK
