Petr Svoboda

I’ve done track and field since I was little. Until I was fourteen, I tried a bit of everything and didn’t take any of it too seriously. Then at fifteen I shot up and improved a lot within a single year. That’s when I fell for elite sport completely and started training for real.

I was good at several events, so my coaches pointed me toward the all-around events from the start. I won my first national medal in the long jump in the winter of 2021, at sixteen. Then things took off: 10 medals at the Czech Championships across age groups. In 2022, I became the Czech U20 decathlon champion and qualified for the World U20 Championships in Cali, Colombia. I went there as the youngest athlete in the field, with the fifth-best score in the world that season. But nerves and expectations that were too high got to me: I didn’t clear a single height in the pole vault, and with that went any hope of a good finish. A tough lesson.

In 2023, I fought through an injury to make the European U20 Championships in Jerusalem. After eight events I was sixth, with a real shot at the top five, but the javelin let me down and I dropped out of the top ten. I finished with 7,499 points, a personal best. A big disappointment and a big motivation at the same time: I knew I had a lot of room to improve.

In the fall of 2023, I was invited to join the training group of Roman Šebrle, former world record holder and Olympic champion, someone I’d looked up to since I was a kid. In February 2024, I won my first senior medal at the Czech Championships, in the indoor heptathlon. The goal for the summer season was simple: break the elite 8,000-point mark.

Instead came a stress fracture in my foot. And that fall, two months after I moved to Prague to train with the group, came the eleventh event: on November 4, 2024, a week after my twentieth birthday, I was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.