We lost that match in Pardubice 0:1 in extra time. It can probably be said that it was not quite the hit that would be remembered.
I personally demonstrated quite a pencil. Nothing special, ordinary extra league routine. We have a point from outside, fine, now quickly throw off your gear and disappear for regeneration, because we are playing again in two days.
But all of a sudden, people marched into the cabin between us and started reading the names of the players who had been selected for the anti-doping control.
“…Controversies…”
“And dude,” flashed through my mind, knowing what had been going on for the week. We had one round pre-played, another postponed and thus a longer break. I threw a party during it, which went a little awry.
“It’s been four days now, that’s fine,” I reassured myself.
But it wasn’t cool.
Defender Vitásek disappeared from the extra league. He doesn’t play for cocaine.
Just type my name into a search engine and tons of headlines along these lines will jump out at you.
They say nothing that I want to downplay or deny. This is what happened. I screwed up and got punished for it. No one was to blame for him but myself. I know very well today why it happened and what I should have done differently in that period, when to pull the handbrake.
But I didn’t see it then.
I couldn’t look at myself from a distance and force myself to change the direction I was rushing. I was miserable for a lot of reasons. They then caught me with drugs in my body, which is simply not allowed to happen to athletes. Dot.
I also understand that such information is interesting in itself. As I enjoyed the pleasant attention years ago when, against all expectations, I found myself in the highest levels of our hockey, I had to count on the fact that now someone will think to find out why I am suddenly not playing anymore.
But there was much more going on in my life than just stuffing myself with stuff I didn’t have. It led to a series of events indicating that something was wrong. Then followed even more fundamental situations. Situations that first forced me to resist and fight at least for the principle in a previously lost battle.
And also situations that clearly showed me what is really important in life.
Don’t expect enlightened bullshit from a reformed sinner. When you wake up in the hospital with a tube in your throat and a cut open chest and you learn that they brought you in five minutes to twelve, you really reconsider a lot. And you will also realize that even the bad things that happened to you had their meaning, because at least now you know where you shouldn’t go.
There is simply enough that I am about to tell. I was just waiting for this moment when I could. When have I settled everything in myself and all disputes in which I figured have already been formally closed. My life is going elsewhere.
I remain disgusted with the way I was treated and disillusioned with how we in our hockey are able to treat people who have a problem. I am not the first and certainly not the last to encounter something like this.
So maybe what I experienced will at least warn someone else.
Jakub Mareš and Profimedia/ČTK/Pavel Paprskář and CNC/Michal Beránek and Pavel Mazáč
