Seven Olympic gold medals, across Tokyo and Mexico City. She remains the only woman to win the individual all-around title at consecutive Games and the only gymnast, of any sex, to have won gold in every individual apparatus event.
June 1968
Caslavska signed the Two Thousand Words manifesto, a public call for the Prague Spring reforms to be carried further. As the reigning Olympic all-around champion she was among the most recognisable signatories.
On 21 August, Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia and the reforms were crushed.
Training in the woods
With signatories being detained, Caslavska left Prague for the mountains near Sumperk. She had ten weeks until the Olympics and no facilities.
She practised beam routines on a fallen tree trunk and maintained strength by hauling coal. She was cleared to travel only shortly before the Games began.
Mexico City
She won gold in the all-around, the vault, the uneven bars and the floor exercise, and silver on the beam and in the team event.
Two of those results were altered by post hoc scoring adjustments that favoured Soviet gymnasts. On the beam a revision moved Natalia Kuchinskaya ahead of her. In the floor exercise, Larisa Petrik's score was raised after the routine had been marked, turning an outright win into a shared title.
The protest
On both occasions Caslavska stood on the podium beside a Soviet gymnast while the Soviet anthem was played, weeks after Soviet tanks had entered her country.
Both times she turned her head to the right and looked down, and held it there for the duration of the anthem.
There was no gesture, no statement, nothing that could be described as a disturbance. It was legible to everyone.
What it cost
She was not imprisoned. She was erased. She was barred from competition, from coaching, from travel and from public life for roughly two decades, and pressed repeatedly to sign a recantation, which she never did.
After the Velvet Revolution, Vaclav Havel appointed her as an adviser, and she later led the Czechoslovak Olympic Committee.
Why it goes on a wall
Because it is the smallest protest in this collection and one of the most expensive. She did not raise anything. She lowered her eyes, and it took twenty years off her life.
Seven golds, and a head turned away.