Prague, Oct 21 (CTK) – Barbora Spotakova, world record holder in javelin throw, will return to her first Czech coach, Rudolf Cerny, before the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro where she will be defending the gold medal, she announced in a written statement Wednesday.
“I firmly believe that we will continue with our successful cooperation after a five-year break,” she said.
Under Cerny’s supervision, Spotakova won the Osaka world championship in 2007 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008 where she broke the world record. She has a silver medal from the Berlin world championship in 2009.
Spotakova, now aged 34, also won the London Olympics in 2012 and the European championship in Zurich last year.
Cerny coached Spotakova for 11 years. In 2010, she moved to coach Jan Zelezny with whom she ended cooperation a year ago because she wanted to spend more time with her son, Janek, who was one year old then. She interrupted her sport career over the pregnancy and childbirth in the 2013 season.
Her cooperation with Zelezny ended after she refused to go to South Africa for several months with the javelin team to train.
Spotakova competed without a coach in the past season. After she failed at the world championship in Beijing in August, she realised that she needed one.
She ended in the ninth position in the Beijing javelin competition. This was her first big event after ten years at which she did not win a medal.
Spotakova said she believed her renewed cooperation with Cerny would be a success.
“I liked his flexibility,” she said, adding that with Cerny she had managed to train and compete and study at university at the same time.
“The Rio Olympics will be the last one at which I will compete, and so I want to do my utmost in the preparation for it. However, I have my family and these two things need to be combined,” she said.
Spotakova was considering cooperating with a foreign coach, but ten months before Rio, she felt she did not have enough time to start cooperating with a new expert and get fully harmonised with him in time.
Cerny said the renewed cooperation is a great challenge for him, but also a great responsibility.
“I believe she will be at the top once again when it is needed the most, that is at the Olympics in Rio,” he said.
“We’ve reached agreement on most issues, same as before,” Cerny said.
Spotakova and Cerny are both members of the Dukla Praha military sports centre.
