The story of the main referee: They thought they could get through

At the Jizerská, there is almost never cheating, but once the two guys fixed the race in a particularly sophisticated way. And it made me even more sorry because I knew them both, father and son. It was ten or twelve years ago, during the qualifying races. In one of those preparatory races, a boy took his dad’s place, because the dad was anxious to go in the first wave of the main race. They thought he would pass, that they would get lost in the crowd. Then they argued that they switched the numbers by mistake, but they knew that we knew they knew. We had to disqualify both of them.

Sometimes there would be someone who simply wanted to start from earlier, more favourable wave, in order to take more space for himself, but today that’s not possible – an electronic carpet tracks the right start time. It’s equipment which receives electronic impulses from the chips that competitors have on their legs. It happened once that the race wasn’t won by a racer from the first wave, but from the second. In 1995 Jan Došla from Brno University won the Fifty. Nobody expected it! He had a start time five minutes behind the first wave, so he did not cross finish line first, but only four minutes later than Stanislav Řezáč, the fastest of the first wave. So all the TV footage of the first runners at the finish was useless.

Would someone shorten the track? In the past, some of the locals who knew the route as well as the back of their hands used to do that under specific snow conditions, but today we have electronic check carpets. All competitors must pass through them. Therefore, disqualification happens mainly because of technique on the course – the Jizerská 50 is traditionally raced classically, you may not skate, and this is checked at both the refreshment stations and discrete places designated by a technical delegate.

But competitors are careful about that. Of course, disqualification can also happen if you give up somewhere in Smědava - and interestingly, far fewer women give up compared to men, perhaps fifty times fewer. It is not said in vain that a woman can handle more than a man.

It happened once that an older gentleman came to us and asked us, “Girls, how does everything run around here?” We wondered, “Come on, sheesh, are you doing this for the first time?” And he said yeah, he bought cross-country skis for his 70th birthday and immediately paid the entry fee for the Jizerská 50. They say you have to start somewhere. "And how much have you trained?" I ask him. "Nothing. This will be my first kilometre on skis.”

Well, we waited for him almost until dusk, he was truly the very last one to come to the deserted stadium. But he arrived with enthusiasm, and said that he will come again in a year.

And would you believe it, he did! What’s more, with a wonderful slivovice. "This is to warm you up, for when you’re waiting for me at the finish again like you did last year, so you don’t get cold." And he checked in with us at the starting line in the following years too, that awesome uncle from Prostějov.

I’ve been the chief referee for the Jizerská 50 for a quarter century. I started helping at the race in 1978 with the Dynamo Youth Tourist Club in Liberec as a 15-year-old. I used to make refreshments with girls under the supervision of Jožka Gabriel, the then-head of the Jizerka refreshment station. My friend Jana Raslová’s dad died on Huascarán, and several of my mother’s friends died there; so I was full of emotions and took the job very seriously. However, I did not run the race once. When I started there, you couldn't run until you were eighteen. And then I got registered as a referee and I was needed elsewhere.

And what does my job entail? Align skiers to the starting chutes, ensure that everyone is in their places with marked skis, and sets off at their time. Then we follow the course of the race, and at the finish we measure the finish time for the first hundred competitors - we are actually doing this in duplicate with the electric meter. At the start there are eight waves, plus a so-called extra-wave. This means there are a hundred competitors, especially foreign ones, selected by the technical delegate of the race. There have to be registrars for each wave; that's why there are about fifty-five of us referees.