Emil Zátopek
Won three golds in eight days at one Olympics, then was sent to work in a uranium mine
Emil Zátopek was one of eight children of a carpenter in Moravia and went to work in the Bata shoe factory at 16. He had no interest in running until the factory forced him into a race at 19. He came second, was picked out by a coach, and began training with an intensity no one else could match, sprinting through the snow in army boots and running dozens of 400 metre repetitions in a session.
He ran with a look of agony, head rolling and face contorted, and journalists mocked his style. It did not matter. He won the 10,000 metres at the 1948 London Olympics and, four years later in Helsinki, at 29, won the 5000 metres, the 10,000 metres and then the marathon, which he had never run before, all within eight days. His wife Dana won the javelin the same afternoon as his 5000 metres. No one has come close to repeating it.
He was an army officer and a genuine believer in communism, but in 1968 he publicly backed the reformers of the Prague Spring. When Soviet tanks arrived he was stripped of his rank, expelled from the party, and sent to work in a uranium mine and then as a labourer digging wells. His name was removed from the record books at home.
He was quietly rehabilitated in the 1980s and fully after 1990. Famous for his generosity, he once gave one of his Olympic gold medals to the Australian runner Ron Clarke, who had never won one.