Sport In The Czech Republic
Sport plays a significant part in the life of many Czechs who are generally loyal supporters of their favourite teams or individuals.
The two leading sports in the Czech Republic are football and ice hockey, both drawing the largest attention of both the media and supporters. The many other sports with professional leagues and structures include basketball, volleyball, handball, athletics, floorball and others. Sport is a source of strong waves of patriotism, usually rising several days or weeks before an event and sinking several days after.
The events considered the most important by Czech fans are: the Ice Hockey World Championship, the Olympic ice hockey tournament, the European football championship, the football World Cup and qualification matches for such events. In general, any international match involving the Czech ice hockey or football national team draws attention, especially when played against a traditional rival: Germany in football; Russia, Finland, Sweden and Canada in ice hockey; and Slovakia in both.
Both summer and winter Olympic games are also very popular.
Read more about Sport In The Czech Republic: Football, Shooting Sports, Baseball, Cricket, Rugby, Individual Sports, The Olympic Games, Youth Sport
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“Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Sport inevitably creates deadness of feeling. No one could take pleasure in it who was sensitive to suffering; and therefore its pursuit by women is much more to be regretted than its pursuit by men, because women pursue much more violently and recklessly what they pursue at all.”
—Ouida [Marie Louise De La Ramée] (1839–1908)
“I wish glib and indiscriminate critics of industrialists had some conception of the problems that have to be met by factory management.... General condemnation of employers is a favorite indoor sport of the uninformed intelligentsia who assume the role of lance- bearers for labor.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“I’m neither Czech nor Slovak ... I’m still trying to figure out who I am. I think I’m Jewish. But first I want to be human.”
—Natasha Dudinska (b. c. 1967)
“No republic is more real than that of letters, and I am the last in principles, as I am the least in pretensions to any dictatorship in it.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)