News

Prime Minister Petr Fiala arrived in Paris on Friday for the official opening ceremony at the Czech House in the French capital’s La Villette park. He was welcomed there to the sound of live music by the head of the Czech Olympic Committee, Jiří Kejval.

The Czech House is intended to serve as a base for Czech fans who have come to Paris to watch the Games and as a place for them to meet competing Czech athletes. It will be open to the public from 5.30pm on Friday. The official Olympic Games opening ceremony is due to kick off two hours later.

Work on building the first section of a planned network of high-speed railway lines in Czechia is due to begin next year, Transport Minister Martin Kupka said on Friday at a conference in Prague for entrepreneurs in the construction industry. The first section of the high-speed network will connect the South Moravian capital of Brno with the town of Přerov in the Olomouc Region. Trains on this new network should be able to travel at speeds of up to 320 kilometres per hour.

Work on the next section between Brno and Břeclav, a town in the South Moravian Region close to the border with Slovakia and Austria, is planned for 2026, while a third route to the Moravian-Silesian Region is scheduled to start in 2028 at the latest. If everything goes well, the construction of the Prague part of the high-speed network should start in 2030, the minister said.

The construction of high-speed railway lines in the country has been discussed since the 1990s, but concrete preparations only started in recent years.

The Czech wrestler Artur Omarov has been forced to drop out of the Olympics due to an Achilles injury. The athlete sustained the injury in training and underwent surgery before his planned departure for Paris, the Czech Olympic Committee said in a statement.

Tennis player Markéta Vondroušová, who took silver at the last Olympics in Tokyo, had earlier been forced to pull out of the Games due to a hand injury.

The number of Czech athletes competing in Paris now stands at 111.

In the first half of this year Russia conducted a wide range of hybrid operations against Czechia, according to a report on extremism for the six months of 2024 published on Thursday by the Ministry of the Interior.

The report says the aim of Russia’s propaganda is to undermine confidence in the Czech state and to make people feel that its regime represents a healthy alternative.

Its authors also say that the Czech extremist and xenophobic populist scene has changed significantly and that Russian security forces in Czechia have gained a solid and easily influenced base that can be used to spread its influence.