A Cech Guinneypig

This year, 32 countries will compete in five main sports: downhill skiing, cross-country, biathlon, curling and sledge hockey. Sledge hockey players are seated in a small sledge on skate blades and shove themselves around the ice with a pair of short hockey sticks.

The Czechs are sending seven athletes to Nagano, four physically disabled male skiers and three blind or partly sighted female skiers.

Dostal uses a single ski and long crutch-like poles with short ski tips attached to the ends, called outriggers.

Dostal has found hope in the healing power of sport. But it has been a struggle.

In Communist Eastern Europe, handicapped children were often kept locked away in institutions and sent to schools for the learning disabled.

Dostal says it was only with the support and perseverance of his family that he was able to overcome quickly what could easily have been a life-breaking handicap.

Encouraged by his grandfather, Emil Dostal, a well-known athletics coach, and his father, Jiri, an enthusiastic amateur athlete, young Jan took up every sport he could: volleyball, basketball, swimming and even the high jump.

His father, a part-time ski instructor, went back to school and took a course in training handicapped skiers.

"The regime didn't want us to play sports; they didn't want us to be seen," said Dostal, who is studying for a degree in coaching disabled athletes. "They wanted to show how 'clean' the country was, and that there weren't many handicapped athletes."

Jan Pauer, one of the founders of the Czech disabled sports movement, said: "Sport was the shop window of the regime. The regime wanted to show how great they were through sport, and handicapped sports weren't attractive for them. It was soccer, hockey, track and field that got the attention and the money."

Pauer lost his left leg when he fell under a Prague tram in 1958, just before his 19th birthday. He founded the first disabled sports club in Prague in 1964.