Olympic stories

Come to the New Building of the National Museum to commemorate the achievements of Czech athletes over the past more than 100 years.

16. 10.30. 9. Olympic Stories – Exhibition at the New Building of the National Museum in Prague The Olympic Stories exhibition maps the successes of Czech athletes from their participation in the Olympic Games in London in 1908 to this year's Olympics in Paris. It presents often never-before-exhibited items from the National Museum's sports collections or unique loans. The exhibition was prepared by the National Museum in cooperation with the Czech Olympic Committee. From the museum collections, you can look forward to models of stadiums in Berlin or Beijing, as well as participant medals – the bronze medal from 1924 of the first Czechoslovak Olympic winner Bedřich Šupčík, the gold medal of equestrian František Ventura (Amsterdam, 1928), the gold medal of gymnast Věra Děkanová (Berlin, 1936), or the silver medal from Munich 1972 of discus thrower Ludvík Daněk. An interesting loan is Zátopka's medal collection and Dana Zátopková's medals from the Rome Olympics, which are preserved by the National Archives. You can also see invitations to social events that took place since the first modern Olympic Games, to which members of the International Olympic Committee and presidents of national Olympic committees were invited, including Jiří Guth Jarkovský and later, for example, Josef Gruss, the second Czech member of the International Olympic Committee. The exhibition also includes the rules and programs of various Olympic competitions over the past decades, promotional prints, and other archival materials. Displayed are also Olympic torches from the first one in Berlin to those from recent years, along with informational prints that were issued for the first run with the Olympic torch. The Olympic torch was also carried for the first and last time across our territory at that time. Additionally, you can look forward to the Jiří Guth Jarkovský Award, which has been the highest domestic award for personalities in the field of sports and Olympism since 1934. The National Museum has also managed to acquire a unique, one-hundred-year-old representative jersey of footballer Paul Mahrer, a participant in the 1924 Olympic Games, for the Olympic Stories exhibition. You can also see artifacts commemorating the 1924 Olympic Games as well as those from this year's summer games, including a replica of the 100-year-old entry outfit from Paris in 1924 and the outfit by Jan Černý, which attracted so much attention this summer. From this year's Olympic Games, you will see the bronze medal of fencer Jiří Beran, which will be replaced by Paralympic awards after a month. Also exhibited are other clothing accessories and memorabilia that accompanied athletes to or from the Olympic Games, telegrams in which fans celebrated Emil Zátopek's victory in Helsinki in 1952, and letters to figure skater Hanka Mašková from the period of her participation in the Winter Olympic Games in Grenoble. The exhibition is complemented by a projection from the archives of the International Olympic Committee (museum in Lausanne), which consists largely of footage from the 2024 games in Paris, as well as footage of the lighting of the Olympic flame over the decades.