One woman overshadowed all other Czech athletes in 2006 — a year that began with high hopes for most and ended with disappointing results for many. Czechs had reason to expect solid results from the national hockey team at the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, and from the national soccer team, which qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 16 years. In the end, however, only veteran cross-country skier Kateřina Neumannová captured glory for her country.

Neumannová, twice an Olympic silver medal-winning cross-country skier, entered her last Olympic race Feb. 24: the women's 30-kilometer (18.6-mile) freestyle competition. Leading Poland's Justina Kowalczyk and Russia's Julia Tchepalova for most of the race, she lost her lead with only a few dozen yards remaining. But the 33-year-old found her second wind and came from behind to win her first and, ultimately, last gold medal.

"The end result was good, so it was all good," Neumannová said.

The rest of the Olympics, and the year for that matter, proved to be bittersweet for Czech athletes.

Ice cold

Czechs returned home from Turin with just four medals. Apart from her gold medal, Neumannová added a silver medal in the 2-by-7.5 kilometer race. Cross-country skier Lukáš Bauer finished second in the men's 15-kilometer race. The highly touted hockey team added a bronze medal, beating Russia, 3-0, Feb. 25.

The team's disappointing results in the preliminary rounds forced it to play catch-up for the rest of the Olympics, and created more cause for worry than celebration among hockey fans.

"Are we happy about the medal?" forward Jaromír Jágr said after the win against Russia. "Well, when we'd been down for so long, it's good that we won't be leaving empty-handed."

Breaking with its original plans, the team decided not to return home to celebrate the medal.

The Turin games served as the swan song for Jágr and several other players from Czech hockey's "golden generation," which, over the previous decade, won five World Championship titles and took gold in the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

Another eagerly awaited event, the World Cup in Germany, also had some spotty play by a Czech team that had high expectations coming into the event.

The national team entered the tournament with an impressive 3-0 victory over the United States, but then lost to Ghana (2-0) and Italy (2-0) and was surprisingly bounced out of the group play before it could advance.

"Our ambitions had certainly been higher," team captain Pavel Nedvěd said after returning from Germany.

Retired stars

After the World Cup, Nedvěd announced his retirement from the national team. Although this was just one of Nedvěd's several retirements from the national team over the years, he insisted that this one was real. The year saw many star Czech athletes walk away from their respective sports.

Three-time Olympic javelin champion Jan Železný competed for the last time in September. A month prior, the 40-year-old managed to win a bronze medal at the European Championships in Athletics in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Tennis legend Martina Navrátilová also walked away from her sport after the 50-year-old Czech-American won a mixed doubles tournament at the U.S. Open in New York in September, alongside American Bob Bryan.

Her farewell appearance in Prague during the ECM Open tournament in early May ended with a controversy after Czech Tennis Association President Ivo Kaderka said that Navrátilová would play only after asking for 1 million Kč ($47,600) in appearance money.

Navrátilová called Kaderka a liar and pulled out of the event at which she had been given top billing.

Controversies

The Navrátilová controversy was just one of many in Czech sports in 2006. The national Olympic team experienced a few extremely embarrassing moments at the Winter Olympics.

Cross-country ski team manager Květoslav Zalčík wrote the wrong name into the starting sheet of the men's 4-by-10-kilometer relay. Instead of writing the name of Milan Šperl, who was to be the last member of the relay, he penciled in Dušan Kožíšek, a substitute who should have been entered in the line below.

The team realized the mistake only minutes before the start of the event, and Kožíšek arrived at the race long after the first relay member had started. Despite starting the final leg of the race in third place, Kožíšek wasn't able to hold the medal position and dropped into ninth. Zalčík was forced to resign because of his blunder.

Ski jumper Jakub Janda's battle with the Czech Skiing Union over whether he should be allowed to wear logos from private sponsors during competition seemed to sap the champion's concentration in Turin. Janda, who in 2006 became the first Czech ski jumper to win the World Cup, was considered a hot medal candidate before the games, but he did not get even close to the podium. Many suspected the dispute left him unprepared for the Olympics.

More recently, soccer club FK Marila Příbram's owner Jaroslav Starka — who is also vice chairman of the Czech Football Association — hired former Viktoria Žižkov soccer manager Ivan Horník, who was previously implicated on charges related to match fixing. Starka ignored protests from within the soccer community, as well as a court order that banned Horník from any activity in soccer for 10 years.