The Olympic Festival 2018 is over already. 17 days, 34 sports and over 250 000 visitors

Seventeen days, 34 sports and over 250 000 visitors – these are the final numbers for the Olympic Festival 2018 in Brno and Ostrava. As with the two previous events organised by the Czech Olympic - Soči-Letná 2014 and Rio-Lipno 2016 – the organisers have declared the winter festival during the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics to have been a great success. Together the venues were visited by 258 895 people.

“The winter edition of the Olympic Festival in Brno and Ostrava is one of the best events that we have organised “under the five rings” in recent years. Visitors to the Olympic Festival again showed that the Czech Republic is not a country only able to unite behind the successes of its sporting heroes in front of a television screen or in pubs, but above all through active sport. This was the objective of the Czech Olympic Committee – to combine support for the Czech colours with the opportunity to try sports that otherwise people would only see on television,” says manager of the project, Naďa Černá.

Brno and Ostrava opened the doors to the Olympic Festival on 9^th February, both transforming into large sports venues that offered the opportunity to try out over thirty sports – Olympic and non-Olympic, winter and summer. In Brno the Olympic Festival took place at the Brno Exhibition Grounds, whilst the centre of the Ostrava part of the project was the OSTRAVAR ARÉNA, on Masaryk Square a Korean village sprang up and at the weekends the programme also extended to four resorts in the hills of the Moravian-Silesian Region: Bílá, Mosty u Jablunkova, Kopřivná pod Pradědem and Karlov pod Pradědem.

The Olympic Festival included Ice Hockey, figure skating, laser gun shooting on a biathlon range, curling, the opportunity to sit in a four-man bobsleigh and a ski jump. Competitions were held every day – for example in biathlon, on a pump track, in ski jumping, and in Brno also in the attra

ctive sport of kryathlon. On the Paralympic days visitors could also try disciplines for handicapped athletes.

Na Olympijském festivalu nechyběl hokej, krasobruslení, možnost zastřílet si na biatlonové střelnici laserovou zbraní, zahrát si curling, nasednout do čtyřbobu nebo spustit se ze skokanského můstku.

The Olympic Festival was visited by over 150 successful Czech athletes, for example former ski jumper and grandson of Jiří Raška, Jan Mazoch, and his colleague and winner of the Four Hills Tournament, Jakub Janda, ice hockey legends Jiří Holík and Jozef Golonka, member of the coaching staff of the gold-winning team at Nagano 1998, Slavomír Lener, former world record holder in the decathlon, Roman Šebrle, members of the four-man bronze-medal kayak team from Rio de Janeiro 2016, Jan Štěrba, Daniel Havel, and Lukáš Trefil, figure skating legend Karol Divín, triathlete Filip Ospalý, Olympic rowing gold medallist Miroslava Topinková Knapková, Olympic shooting gold medallist, David Kostelecký, tennis stars Radek Štěpánek and Lucie Hradecká, and many others.

On Sunday 11th February, in honour of the 50^th anniversary of the first Czechoslovak Winter Olympic gold medal, which was won at Grenoble in 1968 by Jiří Raška, a special train travelled directly to the Exhibition Grounds in Brno: The Raška Express. Travelling from Prague on this train, along with others, was double Olympic champion in canoe slalom Štěpánka Hilgertová with husband Luboš, and canoe sprint specialist Josef Dostál.

After her successful performance at the Olympics in Korea, bronze medal winner in the snowboard cross at PyeongChang 2018, Eva Samková, came to the Olympic Festival to meet the fans, as did figure skating pair Anna Dušková and Martin Bidař, 14th at PyeongChang 2018, and lugers Lukáš Brož and Matěj Kvíčala.

For more information visit www.olympijskyfestival.cz

Contact

Martina Kučerová
Communication ManagerOlympic Festival project 2018
email: kucerova@olympic.cz
mobile: 724 25 15 85