He has tattoos on his thighs. On the left is the word impossible with a crossed out prefix, on the right why not. “I had it done after the indoor season with the idea that it would be my motto,” he recounted. And he proved that nothing is impossible on the Tábor track.
However, the recent finalist of the U23 European Championship went into the championship with a personal record of 20.64 s. And he knocked a quarter of a second off it! “Incredibly unexpected. After all, I wanted to run a time of 20.60, as the limit of the Czech association, so that I could nominate myself for the European Championship in a year. I didn’t expect this,” he marveled as he knocked six hundredths off Jan Jirka’s two-year-old record.
Photo: Jaroslav Svoboda, CTK
Ondřej Macík with his Czech record.
Eight years ago, he went to watch the indoor European championship in Prague’s O2 arena to see one of the triumphs of the then indoor quarter-final king, Pavel Maslák.
“That’s when it started. I came to Dukla, I was trained by Martin Chyba. Then I switched to Michal Novák, and the cooperation suits us,” he praises the training under the coach, who, in addition to the athletes, also takes care of the fitness of the Olympic champion in snowboard cross, Eva Adamczyková.
“Sometimes we meet in the gym, after all, he has a different preparation. But the coach is versatile and you can see that it works for us, and he is also a wonderful person,” praised Nováka.
Macík can take heart from the fact that he can beat his former role model and inspiration, Maslák, in the 200m, just as he did in the final of the 200m in Tábor. “For me, it is an incredible honor to train with him in the same club and race, but he is the best that Czech sprint has ever had,” he says before Maslák, who held the Czech record in the 200m ahead of Jirka.
Maslák competed in three Olympic Games and Macík has a similar wish, even though there are even fewer European sprinters in the 200. “It’s difficult, but I’d like to see myself at the start in Paris in a year, that’s my dream,” he admits.