Nearly a century ago, a thirteen-year-old named Zdeněk Koubek was working at a clothing shop in a suburb of Brno, in Czechoslovakia, when a young doctor came into the store and passed him a note. The doctor wanted Koubek to invite a co-worker of his, an eighteen-year-old girl named Boženka, to come to a track-and-field meet where the doctor would be competing. It was a date, sort of.
To thank Koubek, the doctor included an extra ticket. A few days later, Koubek and Boženka went to a small stadium to watch the competition. When the hundred-metre dash began, Koubek found himself transfixed.
Something about the way the men ran—the rush of air past their bodies, the freedom of movement—was electrifying. Koubek had always known that he was different. To the world, he was a girl, although he would eventually understand himself not to be.
As a teen-ager, this nagged at him, but now he had an escape from those worries: track and field. He couldn’t get enough; he devoured the sports section of every newspaper he could find and cut out photos of the best sprinters. He started training—running laps and practicing the high jump.
He joined a small-time women’s club in Brno, and was fast enough to draw the attention of a club associated with the local university. (A friend had told a team official that Koubek was “a girl with the devil in their body.”) Soon he was travelling to competitions across the country and beyond.
In 1932, a few years after he first took an inter.
