Olympic gold

Strong medal counts at the London Olympics by the U.S. and the U.K. show that Western models of training and funding sports can still compete against the Chinese and fading Soviet models. For Czechs, one of the big questions now is whether the success of this year's Olympics can be repeated after the retirement of the athletes and coaches who grew to greatness thanks to the Communist-era system. Over the past 20 years, Czechs have been mainly world-calibre in the theft of national assets, which must eventually show up in such quotidian affairs as sports. With the big and little godfathers now controlling so much of the economy, a sports infrastructure that doesn't benefit from this enormous concentration of wealth is going to be short-changed. Success at future Olympics is more in the hands of this state within a state than the ČSTV sports union or the Czech Olympic Committee.