Olymp Prague Women

Veronika Pešková plays her volleyball in a hall on Přípotoční street. Olymp Prague traces itself back to 1957, when it took the ice under the name Rudá Hvězda Praha, and the domestic game barely had a rival worth naming through the 1970s and 1980s: twelve Czechoslovak championships between 1974 and 1992. The club took a new name in 1990, and another in 1994, settling on PVK Olymp Praha as the country it played in changed shape around it.

Independence brought a different league and the same habit of winning it. Twice, in 1978 and 1980, the side reached beyond Czechoslovak borders altogether and won the European Cup Winners' Cup, a continental mark few clubs from the country have matched since.

Supporters still call the team Holky z Olympu — the girls from Olymp — an informal tag that outlasted every rebrand the club went through. It sits more easily on a side built, generation after generation, around players who came up through the same rooms: Itka Tůšková-Topková and Zuzana Malá-Kočmarčková carried the shirt through the championship years of the 1970s and 1980s, and Pešková now does the same for a squad chasing a return to that kind of company.