2024-03-31 01:52:23
His cousins are water slalom skier Jiří Prskavec and pole vaulter Matěj Ščerba. Twenty-six-year-old Ondřej Rapp established himself as a long jumper, but now he dreams of going to the Olympic Games as a bobsledder. However, he did not choose the path of a professional athlete. In an interview with the daily Aktuálně.cz, he talked about how he fought his way through American universities and came into conflict with the culture there.
When one looks at your family, were you never attracted to sports for a living?
It was always divided in our family. Jirka Prskavca’s father had it built in such a way that he puts all in into sports, that will feed him and hey. While my mother was all in on education. Both my parents are doctors.
You must have been a college student, right?
Exactly, but I’m glad for it. When I was 17, my mother insisted that if I wanted to do both at a professional level, I had to go to a prestigious American university. That studies and sports cannot be combined here. At the same time, Matěj succeeded. He studied artificial intelligence in math physics, he works part-time at it, and at the same time he will probably go to the summer Olympics.
What does such a Czech athlete have to do for successful admission to an American university?
At that time, my mother paid for the help of the Stipendia agency, which promised to get me to an American university. It happened that I got two dogs. One was preparation for the American high school diploma and the other for the English Proficiency Test. There was no problem with English, I was above average in the class, so I assumed I would pass it. Then I passed the entrance exams a second time. The agency then found me two coaches from prestigious universities who would take care of me based on my sports results and thus secure a scholarship for my education in America for four years. One of them was Jason Munch from the Florida Institute of Technology, who I ended up choosing.
But after a year and a half you transferred to the University of California, why?
I had a great season there. I jumped 7.5 meters into the distance. I won the American conference with it, it made it to the USA championships, where I went all the way to the finals. Paradoxically, it was there that I realized for the first time that I might not be doing the right sport.
How so?
I worked hard, but I still wasn’t the best. Then I heard the stories of the best who said they had been doing athletics for two years and jumped over eight meters. I was a muscular but stocky boy. All around me were six-foot-tall African-Americans. It was still a success and my coach got an offer from New York University. However, my field of study was not there. And if I didn’t want to pay for my education myself, which amounted to about a million and a half crowns per semester, I had to look elsewhere for something better.
How did you do it?
I circled college athletic trainers from all over the states. Athletics is great at this. We have tables, I jumped so much and so much, I placed so and so, there you have me. I also received an offer to transfer to Stanford, but they only competed in the second division and I wanted to compete with the best. So I was choosing from three schools that I could visit, visit the university, the city, the sports field and decide which one I wanted to choose. It’s a great system that’s set up because of American football players, but other sports will ride with it.
How is it going?
They will pay for your flight, accommodation and food for the whole weekend. You will also meet the professors who would teach you so that you can decide where you like the most. That’s how I visited the University of Missouri, Ohio and then the one in Los Angeles, which I finally chose. After all, when a guy from Jablonec flies to LA, it’s thick for you. But in the final I made a small mistake with it.
Which one?
I did not like the cultural environment there. I didn’t have many friends, we didn’t sit down with the coach. Although my performance did not go down completely, it stagnated, but I started to focus more on school. When covid started I dropped out and never went back. I started working and focusing on other things.
Are you alluding to the fact that you were “that” Czechoslovak for the Americans?
If only when I spoke with my bad accent in freshman year, they thought I came from the USSR and not the Czechoslovakia. The dumber ones suggested the Soviet Union, the slightly smarter ones suggested Czechoslovakia. But as I moved up in academic circles, it got better. I even came across one professor, a native American, who spoke Czech.
He reported to the lecturers whether he felt he was a man or a woman
So is there another mentality that doesn’t match ours?
The mental difference is huge. I don’t think anyone who goes there for a while, even for half a year, knows it. But it’s only when you study there for four years that you realize how different it is there. I will give an example. I went to a cafe with a friend and his wife. He ordered a cappuccino and then added in English “and my wife will have a frapuccino”. At that moment the barista stopped and corrected him “You don’t mean your wife but you mean your partner.” So, according to him, he should have said partner, because woman or wife is the objectification of women. Everything must be gender neutral.
And did that affect you at school as well?
Yes. When attendance was taken, we had to say not only our name, but also the address “he, him” so that the lecturer would be clear if I felt like a man or a woman. I only found out after 14 days why we say that and I didn’t understand it at all. The culture there is set in such a way that it is completely normal to feel non-binary and to report “they, them”. It culminated in my obsession here in the Czech Republic to speak a little more openly about the problem.
Are you afraid that something similar might come to the Czech Republic?
Unfortunately yes. American author Abigail Shrier talks about the fact that in LA it is completely common to prescribe antidepressants to children. The hypercorrect society in California has no idea what it’s causing. After all, it is normal that a thirteen-year-old child sometimes feels alone, that he is looking for himself and does not know who he is. But instead of trying to analyze what’s behind it, they just deal with it in a clinical way. It’s a problem in America.
“I despise mental coaches”
So you graduated from California as a psychologist with an athletic career, that’s still a long way to the bobsled…
I didn’t do sports for a year and I gained 15 kilos, I was sweating, it was terrible. So I went on a keto diet, lost 15 kilos again within two months. I tried to get back into athletics, but once you miss the train, you never catch up. They asked me if I wanted it as a bobsledder. I tried the tests and it turned out I could do it. Now, after two years, I’m already on the edge of the A team, and the idea of the Olympics is not so far away. And besides, I’m still able to do my job.
But that is completely outside your field, why didn’t you stick with psychology?
I studied clinical and behavioral psychology. Part of the education was the obligation to spend the summer somewhere in the field. So my parents arranged for me to do an internship at a hospital in Liberec, and I have to say that it opened my eyes quite a bit. Thanks to my parents, I have always had a strong relationship with medicine, I thought that psychology would be a nice connection. But I’m quite an empathetic person, cheerful, I like when people laugh, but that didn’t happen much in psychiatry. Also, when I saw the pay conditions of psychologists, they are extremely undervalued for what they go through. But that’s true of all doctors. That’s why I went in a completely different direction.
According to your bio, it could be said that, loosely translated, you make a living as a “data manager”, what does that mean?
There is a branch of psychology called corporate psychology. Companies hire me to build data architecture and take care of data quality. We set up processes in large companies so that everything works for them. Thanks to this, I have time for everything around, including bobs.
Were you never attracted to sports psychology?
That’s certainly what I thought. I’ve given this a lot of thought and I’m still educating myself in this area. But I still don’t trust myself enough to take an athlete under my wing. There are quite a few sports psychologists in the Czech Republic, but they are not so much psychologists as coaches. And I despise that. These are people who have never studied neuropsychopathology. He doesn’t know what exactly is going on in the brain when certain topics are brought up with clients. It’s a sting in a hornet’s nest and you never know how you might hurt that person.
Do you see it as a problem that athletes entrust their care of the mental side to someone who does not have the proper education?
Some time ago, together with my best friend, slalom skier Lukáš Rohan, I gave lectures for the athletes of the Victoria High School Sports Center of the Ministry of Education and Culture, and we talked about psychology and how it could help them. We investigated their needs and experiences. And a lot of people these days already have the negative ones with a psychologist. Personally, I think that one day I will be a sports psychologist, but I dare not say when, I am not yet educated enough for that.
So how to distinguish between a mental coach and a psychologist?
The mental coach course lasts two months and is run by agencies, non-state, not regulated in any way. Studying psychology is a four- to six-year study that is regulated by the state and requires practice. So let the reader draw his own picture. I definitely don’t lump mental coaches together. I know that Lukáš Rohan works with coach Jan Mühlfeit, for example, and he is very satisfied. This is one of those who do it right. But unfortunately this is not the rule.
Let’s go back to how you became a bobsledder. You indicated that bobsledders have contacted you saying you might be a good fit…
Most bobsledders in the world are ex-athletes who gain weight and become bobsledders. It must be fast, strong and ideally also heavy. They are guys who have a 100 under 11 seconds, move 150 kilos, squat over 200 kilos and weigh 110, so it’s ideal. But that’s not all.
Two-meter-tall muscle men vomit after bobsledding
What else is needed?
Sixty percent of what a good bobsledder does is lack of fear. It used to be said that one out of every four people who try bobs won’t go a second time, now I wouldn’t be afraid to say that every second one, because over time people have softened a bit.
Ondřej Rapp (second from the right) part of the Czech four-bob | Photo: Archive of Ondřej Rapp
What does such a bobsledder experience during the ride?
No one can imagine that until they try. At 140 kilometers per hour, you turn a 360-degree turn in 30 meters, pushing 6G. You are not bound in the iron structure, it tosses you from side to side. How many times do two-meter-tall muscular men get out, throw up and say that they won’t sit in it anymore.
But you keep your hand on the brake, isn’t that better?
The brakeman is no better. The other guys sit in it and their spines are straightened. When 6G acts on you, it is as if a 100-kilogram person has 600 kilos on his back. But I’m leaning forward on the brake, so it often happens that the pressure pushes my head up between my knees, which I would never normally do.
I saw your video for the Czech Olympic Committee channel, where you describe, among other things, how to procure all the service yourself. If I make it easy, how far are the Czechs from Kokos on snow?
It’s a small sport. But it’s not as bad as it might seem. It is mainly an extremely expensive sport. One bob costs three million crowns. The Czech national team goes with a maximum of two crews. We tried three last year, but it didn’t work very well. We had to ride older bobsleds and we weren’t quite competitive. Apart from Germany and probably Switzerland, it is very similar in all countries.
Also don’t they have servicemen?
When you tell a mechanic to prepare a bob for a race, he doesn’t really know how until he sits in it himself. And the union doesn’t have to pay an exbobist for that, who knows what and how and who would tour the races with us. We have several professional athletes who are paid to do this. Plus two coaches and that’s it. From picking the beans to preparing them, we do everything ourselves.
How do you train?
We cannot complain about the training conditions. We have an eighty-meter trainer in Prague at Olymp. In the winter, during the season, they go to the races a week in advance so that the pilot learns the track and the brakeman learns when to brake. That’s usually enough.
Are you dreaming of the Olympics, how real is that dream?
If I don’t speak for myself, I can almost promise you that we’ll have one quadruple crew there. Two, that’s already very difficult. But if I speak for myself… Last year I was the sixth best brakeman to have a certain place at the Olympics, I need to be in the top 5. This year I took the preparation really seriously, I am very motivated, I have a stable job, so I believe that I will improve even more. But if I will be in the A team for the Olympics, I can’t say now.