After Paris slip, Czech Olympian Aneta Holasová rises with new purpose
Czech Olympian, Aneta Holasová, injured herself months before the European Championships, failing to qualify for Paris 2024. Her story acts as a testimony that “everything happens for a reason.” What is the athlete doing now?
“Gymnastics was my work for three years. Now I don’t have the results, so I don’t have my job anymore.”
Aneta Holasová, 23-year-old Czech gymnast, failed to qualify for her second Olympics after she tore her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in March of 2023, just before the world championships. The very stage where she previously secured her spot for Tokyo 2021.
When I first met Anetka, I arrived armed with media-fed clichés surrounding Olympic athletes, imagining someone as polished and unapproachable as the gold medal on a pedestal. To me, elite athletes operate in the same stratosphere as celebrities, so I anticipated someone aloof, detached, and arrogant. In our first meeting, and each one since, she has been a bundle of warmth wrapped in wit, with patience that outlasted my ignorance, and a goofy sense of humor that shattered my misconceptions.
In 2020, her gymnastics achievements earned her a spot on the Czech Ministry of Interior’s Olympic Team, Olymp. This role involved 8-hour training sessions 5 or 6 days a week, replacing a regular 9-to-5 job, and came with a salary of approximately CZK 15,000—over 64% below the national average monthly salary, according to the Czech Statistics Office.
Anetka’s coaches warned against overtraining, but with qualifying for Paris 2024 being just one of the things on the line, she felt like she had to push past her injury. “If I didn’t try, I would regret it,” Anetka said in between munches of apple slices. “What worse could happen?” She grimaced at this last part and we both chuckled as she followed up with, “well, my knee got worse. But I didn’t know that would happen!”
Olymp required Anetka to achieve a minimum of 50 points to stay on the team. For context, Simone Biles averages around 55 points, and Anetka's personal best is 52. Months after her surgery, Anetka left the European Championships in Italy with 49 points and a contract termination from Olymp.
Her ACL condition worsened after the competition, necessitating additional surgeries and months of physical therapy, which she described as, “more painful than a devil poking you in the ass.”
Torn But Not Broken
I first met Anetka in an urban café near the Petřín Gardens. Our time there was full of giggles and deep talks, and a reenactment of her most recent ACL injury:
Sliding her granola bowl backward with a soft clink against her lemonade glass, she rearranged salt and pepper shakers, a napkin holder, and a straw wrapper on the small square table to demonstrate the different “apparatuses,” as she called them.
Pressing the tips of her index and middle fingers to the table, she mimicked walking along the straw wrapper as if it were a balance beam. Her finger person performed jumps and flips on the makeshift beam, effortlessly replicating the well-practiced routine she knew better than the back of her hand.
“Back handspring, loso, loso into a back handspring, layout, step-out, layout, step-out…”
To me, she might as well have been speaking French—or Czech, for that matter.
When she glanced up to confirm that I was following, I offered a smile. It probably looked as convincing as a poker player with the worst hand in the game, because she just laughed.
I regret not studying a “Gymnastics for Dummies” guide before meeting Anetka. Still, if she’s been able to coach 15 primary school kids during her recovery, one clueless 20-year-old American shouldn’t be too much of a challenge, so she tried again.
“You put your hands here,” Anetka said, extending her arms straight out in front of her, palms flexed as if gripping an invisible beam, I mimicked her. Outstretching our arms at each other in this corner table at a cafe must have looked ridiculous. But I was learning from a pro.
“Then you do the same movement as a back handspring,” she continued, snapping her hands back and twisting her body as though mid-flip. “Just without your hands on the beam.”
She finished with a sharp flick of her hands in the classic gymnastics landing pose, flashing a picture-perfect smile to signal the end of her demonstration.
My jaw dropped.
“Yeah,” she chuckled, letting out a sigh. “The beam is pretty narrow. I tore my ACL.”
Balancing Life and Love
“She was always running around,” said Anetka’s mother, Jana, whose hand gestures remained wildly animated throughout our conversation.
Anetka started gymnastics at 4½ years-old, as a way for her to “get her energy out,” Jana explained. Her parents encouraged her to try different sports. In the end, gymnastics stuck the landing, so to speak.
“She doesn’t have any friends outside of the gymnastics,” said Jana.
Aleš, Anetka’s father, stayed silent throughout the conversation, focusing on preparing the steak and achieving prime crispness on the sweet potato fries. Throughout my whole evening in their home, he spoke very little. He was likely less confident in English than Jana, who is an English teacher. Still, he nodded along, either understanding, politely agreeing, or perhaps, he adopted the neutral expression of someone trying not to reveal just how lost they are, like my initial conversation with Anetka.
Their home was warm and inviting, with plush rugs, intimate seating, and shelves overflowing with a colorful collection of board games. After dinner, we indulged ourselves in a couple of rounds, passing the time until Aleš served his cheesecake.
A few weeks after dining with Jana and Aleš, Anetka invited me to her home, where she told me I was her first-ever guest. Her apartment, which she shares with her boyfriend, two-time Olympian Martin Konečný, sharply contrasts Jana and Aleš’s. The modern space features an open-plan living room with a cozy white couch and minimalist shelves showcasing the couple’s gymnastics medals.
Upon closer inspection of the couple's apartment, however, the corners reveal piles of stuffed animals, some belonging to Anetka, some to Martin, and a combination of others they’ve collected over their four years together. In the kitchen, Anetka stepped onto a stool to grab me a mug, revealing a cupboard filled with a playful collection of Disney-themed mugs. Later in our conversation, she invited me into her room where I noticed their Winnie the Pooh bed linens. Both sides of the bed were adorned with soft bunnies and other cuddly critters, half of them had weathered fur that stuck to their sides and faded beady eyes. Anetka confirmed to me that half was Martin's, their age mirroring Martin himself, who is 16 years Anetka’s senior.
“He has a job and can take care of me,” said Anetka. “If I had a boyfriend closer to my age, I’d have to quit gymnastics and get a job.”
Martin is the owner of Gymnastická Akademie Praha (GYMPRA), and the pair met during COVID when Anetka’s gym, TJ Bohemians Praha (Bohemka), was under construction and she needed somewhere to train for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics.
When Anetka discovered the Olympics would be postponed by a year, she faced a tough decision. Encouraged by her now-boyfriend Martin, she decided to switch training under Zdenka Tcholaková to Ján Žifčák in preparation for Tokyo 2021. Although she and Martin didn’t officially start dating until after the Olympics, she reflected on that challenging time, “mentally, I think I was okay because I was with Martin.”
Overcoming Olympic challenges
After her injury in 2023, Anetka took advantage of the recovery period to pursue a bachelor's degree in sports medicine and coaching. Since starting professional training at the age of 10, Anetka has consistently taken the spring semester off from school to focus on gymnastics. “I put school aside because if you try to do both, neither turns out well,” she explained. “My teachers got used to it.”
Through Jana, Anetka found a part-time job as an after-school gymnastics coach. “I started bringing one of these,” she said, pursing her lips to blow out a short series of high-pitched bursts in the air, leading to looks from passersby who were likely wondering what I had done to deserve this woman's angry whistling, “the kids were screaming and running everywhere.”
Once she recovers, Anetka hopes to continue training, her sights set on Los Angeles 2028. When I asked if she’d consider becoming a gymnastics judge, her emphatic, “NO!” left no doubt that she would rather remain actively involved in the gym as a coach.
Reflecting on her current after-school coaching, she noted that her students only meet once a week, “when you have them every day, you can help them improve. But when it’s just once a week after school, they’re like animals.”
Animals have inspired many of her lessons with the kids: “We pretend we’re going to the zoo, and they act like the animals they’d see there,” she explained. “For example, they crawl around like a dog, but then I tell them they’re a dog with only three legs, so they lift one leg. Or they pretend to be monkeys, but monkeys that can only walk on their hands.”
In Anetka’s words, not qualifying for the Paris Olympics was “difficult, but not devastating.” During her recovery, she has enjoyed traveling with her parents, boyfriend, and friends—a sharp contrast to her previous experiences, where sightseeing was, “mainly from the bus ride to the gym.”
After the New Year, Anetka will resume professional training, but with a new perspective: “not to have the goals, because it could change anytime.” Feeling grounded in her current coach, relationships, and career path, she highlighted, “there are more important things, it’s okay.”
