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Emil and Dana
They were born on the same day, the 19th of September 1922, but that coincidence was not the only one for the most famous Olympic couple. Emil  Zatopek and Dana Zatopkova won a gold medal in the fifteenth Olympic Games. Dana Zatopkova was the winner in the javelin throw final. She won her first Olympic medal in the last Olympic organization before the wooden javelins were replaced by metallic ones. Emil Zatopek, who had already won in the previous days the 5,000m and the 10,000m, participated in the marathon for the first time, achieving with his victory in that event something that no-one had ever accomplished: a gold medal in the three long-distance events at the same Olympics.
Emil and Dana met during sports games in the Czech Republic, a few months before the London Olympics. Dana Ingrova, as was her maiden name, set a new national record in the javelin throw, thus securing her participation in the Olympics. In London Zatopek dominated the long distances (first in the 10,000m, second in the 5,000m), although he was not included in the favourites. During that period in London they decided to get married, which they did a few months later.
Four years later Emil Zatopek and Dana Zatopkova participated again in the Olympic Games, winning a total of four gold medals. The last time they participated together in the Olympic Games was in Melbourne in 1956. Having recovered from a serious injury the 33-year-old Zatopek finished sixth in the marathon in his last participation in the Olympics, while Zatopkova came fourth in the javelin throw. In 1960 in Rome Dana won the silver medal in the javelin throw and then gave up competitive sport.
For the most famous couple of athletes the next turning point in their lives was not an athletic event. The effort of political transform by the Czechoslovakian president Alexander Dubcek in 1968, that came to be known as the "Spring of Prague", provoked the reaction and the military invasion by the Soviet Union. Zatopek and Zatopkova were among those who had signed the famous "2,000 words manifesto" in July 1968. In August of the same year, when the Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, they were among those who demonstrated in the streets of Prague. They preferred to remain in the country and not go to the West, so their punishment by the new regime was exemplary. They were debarred from the Communist Party and Zatopek was discharged from the army and deprived of the rank of colonel. He was also removed from the post of chief trainer. He was sent to the province and worked searching for uranium deposits. Later he was placed in the Ministry of Sport as reader of sports pages of the international press. He retired in 1980. Until the so-called "Velvet Revolution" (1990), which signalled the fall of the Communist Party, Εmil Zatopek and Dana Zatopkova were forbidden to give any interviews and communicate with western media representatives. However, they were not forgotten and their photograph after Zatopek's victory in the marathon of 1952 was one of the most published pictures in the history of the Olympic Games.
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