Charming smile, always full of energy and very friendly. This is how people will forever remember Olga Fikotová Connolly, who died on April 12, 2024 at the age of 91. She won gold for Czechoslovakia at the 1956 Melbourne Games in the discus throw. After forced emigration, she represented her new home, the United States of America, at the Olympics four times. And she got a huge honor. At the 1972 Munich Games, she was the first athlete born outside the US to carry the stars and stripes flag at the opening ceremony.
She experienced the story like a novel. At the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Olga Fikotová fell in love with American hammer thrower Harold Connolly, who, like her, took home a gold medal from Australia. But their love was complicated by the Cold War.
Fikot’s comrades in Czechoslovakia did not want to allow a marriage with an American athlete. Finally, following the intercession of the Zátopky couple with President Antonín Zápotocký, she was able to get married, directly in Prague on the Old Town Square, where 30 thousand people arrived for the spectacular event!
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Although Ms. Olga wanted to continue competing for Czechoslovakia, the communists forbade her and even lied that the national team had given up. Fortunately, the new homeland soon accepted her as its own. Olga Fikotová played for the USA in four Olympics. In Munich 1972, she even had the honor of carrying the flag of the American expedition during the opening ceremony as the first ever “non-American” flag bearer.
The Connollys’ marriage lasted seventeen years until they divorced, and the two successful athletes raised four children together. Even following the separation, they got along great until Harold’s death in 2010. Mrs. Olga became a social worker following her career, helping poor people or immigrants.
She visited her homeland for the first time almost fifty years later in 2006. Two years later, she received the Fair Play Award of the Czech Olympic Committee in Prague and met her friend Dana Zátopková.
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Olga Fikotová Connolly stayed with the sport until later in life. She received her fitness instructor certificate from the University of California, Irvine and moved to Nevada in 2017, where she worked as a trainer in Las Vegas. “I am a personal trainer and exercise therapist at a fitness club. We also try to help people who have developed chronic problems by neglecting or misusing their bodies,” revealed the eighty-eight-year-old Olga at the time.
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