Jaša Bakov, Olympian, unique, worldly and ours

Every place on the planet, a village, a small town, has some peculiar person, a weirdo, as the Dalmoshis would say, an "original" who amuses the environment with his actions, but in the end it turns out that there was a system and astonishing results in his peculiarity. Joakim Jaša Bakov (Đurđevo, December 10, 1906 - Novi Sad, October 21, 1974) was one of them, but his personality had a double dimension: in every place where he lived, he caused admiration, he achieved success, but also caused suspicion because of his persistence - and he lived in many cities of the former Yugoslavia, both the royal ones and the latter ones. And that makes him the only "original" whose fame spread throughout the entire country, and here and there it flashed beyond its borders.

The people of Novi Sad remember well the strange man who entered the city bus carrying a home-made athletic javelin with a nail on top. Especially those from Liman, because in that neighborhood Jaša Bakov finally got a decent apartment in his later years, certainly deserved in many ways and long ago. And that small apartment looked more like a workshop for making sports props and an exercise area than a well-organized place to live. This is beautifully shown in the film's stills Athletic life, which was filmed by Belgrade television in 1971, directed by Srđan Karanović.

photo: private archive

Gliding with sails

I personally remember him as a young (for me, 12, 13 years old) stout build in a jacket, with a scarf around his neck and a hat on his head, who rode on the surface of the Danube arm of Šodros, bound by half a meter thick ice. He stood out from the wrapped and snuggled teenagers from Novi Sad who rode slowly, in pairs or in smaller groups, on the furrowed ice surface, with the speed of movement, or with the sail he constructed himself so he could sail on the ice. Legend has it that in Sarajevo, at the Zetra pond, with about thirty followers and wooden hockey sticks, he contributed to the popularization of winter sports, which later resulted in the magnificent Winter Olympics in 1984. On the frozen Shodroš, Jaša Bakov also organized a student skating championship, and to make the participants and spectators more comfortable, he hired members of the JNA to cook tea in large cauldrons. It's hard to imagine that scene, because Šodros hasn't frozen over during the winter for a long time, and today swans and ducks spend the winter in it, waiting for an investor who sees the outline of some kind of marina in the muddy shores, or simply a dead surface.

He finally entered the legend in the context of the Olympic Games, which he described: "The Olympics is not an event, it's a holiday! Great, universal, unique, eternal! His greatness is in the expression of man in the game, in the joy of his powers. A strange holiday, an understandable holiday, close, intimate, clear, sweet and simple, but many-sided, rich, diverse, interesting, attractive, acceptable. Happy holiday”.

BERLIN, TOKYO

He took part in the Olympics for the first time in 1936 in Berlin, where he achieved the state record in the pole vault. In addition to sports training, he also learned German as part of his preparations, and then he started learning Japanese in preparation for the Olympic Games planned for 1940. Since they were not held due to the war, the Japanese language went into the background for a while, and Yasha Bakov continued to follow the events related to the Olympics - preparations for the Olympics in Melbourne 1956, described in the brochure Split - our Melbourne, as well as the athletic competitions at the Rome Olympics in 1960, which he described in detail in the book From the Tiber to Monte Maria.

photo: private archive

He went on trips supplied with provisions (so he could serve himself "bread, Pirotski cheese and wonderful Pancevo prosciutto pork and Subotica apples") for breakfast, without daily allowances and accreditations. That's how he headed to holiday in Rome, where he followed the athletic competitions throughout the Olympics, but he did not miss to bathe in the Tiber every day, visit the Vatican and the museums, go to the Basilica of St. Paul, visit the Spanish Square, the Forum and other Roman sights. He comments on all this through the eyes of a man who has seen the world, but still carries within himself that spark of humility before the greatness of history and the ability of the human body to fulfill the request city, height, fortius! Instead of a dry enumeration of sports results - admittedly, he did not hide his admiration for the seventeen-year-old athlete Sergej Bupka - he offered readers a kind of sports travelogue, and at the same time pointed out all the richness of his interests.

Finally, he was destined to attend the Olympics in Tokyo (1964), and the events related to that event best illustrate the greatness of Yasha Bakov's sportsmanship described in a separate brochure. Japanese Olympics. After three years of learning the Japanese language, he went to Japan by train via Moscow and all of Siberia, and then by ship, which must have taken some time. However, the desire and curiosity to see and meet everything possible along the way was stronger than the need for travel comfort. In Tokyo, he visited all the officials who could provide him with tickets, until he reached the very top of the organization. A negative answer was unacceptable for him, and the fact that he did not use English, which he knew well, but Japanese, which was sufficient for current needs, helped in his persuasion.

He found out that about 35.000 foreigners are coming to Tokyo for the Olympics, few of whom speak Japanese. When asked how many of them would be able to sing the Japanese national anthem at the opening of the games, he received the answer that there are none. And then he sang... And got tickets for all athletic competitions, in the end paid for with twenty dollars, money sent to Tokyo by his former student, later academician Vojislav Marić. In his diary from Tokyo, he wrote: "People give their lives for the national anthem, so Miyauchi-san doesn't give tickets!"

ORIGINAL

Of course, there was much more to Jaša Bakov's life that made him an "original" and a sports legend.

Born in a Ruthenian family, he was left without a father at the dawn of the First World War. He continued his life with his mother, whom he deeply respected and to whom some of his literary achievements are even linked. After high school, under the influence of his mother and grandfather, who was a priest in the local church, he enrolled in theology in Rome. For a short time, he then enrolled in philology in Belgrade and graduated in 1934. He was assigned as a substitute in Slavonska Požega (1935), then worked in Koprivica, and from the fall of 1936 in Sombor, where he remained until the end of World War II, when the occupation authorities moved him to Novi Sad. After the war, he taught for a while at the lower gymnasium in Ruski Krstur, where he also worked as a teacher in a boarding school, and then again in Novi Sad. Then the realization of his long-standing desire to devote himself to sports, now as an athletic trainer, began. In 1952, he moved to Sarajevo as a professional trainer in the Academic Club "Sarajevo" and a republican athletics instructor.

In retrospect, it can be said that those were his most fruitful years. He moved to Pancevo in 1956, and in 1960 to Belgrade, "to the University of Belgrade in order to sow the seeds of athletics among the students." He finally returned to Novi Sad again as a coach in the "Vojvodina" athletics club, to enjoy his well-deserved retirement for barely three years from 1971. This biography does not show all that love and sacrifice, all the efforts and bringing of oneself, all personal potential, into the process of propagating sports and not only sports in a country where many things were foreign and elusive. He believed that "in athletics, it is easier to create the top than the middle" - and he created the middle.

photo: private archive

He was a competitor, champion, coach, initiator, "mass worker", and sometimes an official. At the age of fifteen, in 1921, he founded the sports, football and athletics club "Đak" in Đurđevo. Three years later, he participated in the high school championship in Zrenjanin, and already in 1932, at the Yugoslav landing in Ljubljana, he won first place in the all-around. Two years later, in 1934, he participated in the Balkan Games in Zagreb, and the following year in Udine, he achieved a record of 3,60 m in the pole vault (the one made of bamboo). As a participant in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, he raised that record to 3,70 m, and a year later he achieved his best result in the pole vault - 3,75 m, which he held for 11 years.

Wherever he worked, he tried to expand the sport, to create a broad base from which talents would be selected. He trained anyone who wanted to test his abilities, in meadows by the rivers, improvised stadiums and empty lots, making props, hammers, spears himself, sometimes financing from the salary that often did not arrive on time. Jaša Bakov knew well what the athletic field should look like, but he did not have the opportunity to work on it for a long time. He trained his wards outside, regardless of the seasons, but winter was still reserved for Jaša Bakov's second love - ice skating. Instead of the stadiums where he watched hockey championships, such as the World Cup in Switzerland in 1961, Jaša Bakov had at his disposal frozen ponds, backwaters of the Danube or Vojvodina canals; sliders in figurines with cleats and homemade sticks, he tried to rise to hockey champions, starting from Sarajevo, and then everywhere he worked later.

photo: private archive

During his short stay in Russian Krstur (1945–1949), he participated in the founding of the Ruthenian newspaper "Ruske slovo", the magazine "Svetlošč" and Matica Rusinska, and in addition to his journalistic work, he advocated reforming the spelling of the Ruthenian language in accordance with the rules adopted in Serbian orthography was introduced by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. Towards the end of his life, he dedicated himself to leading the church choir at the Ruthenian-Ukrainian church in Novi Sad; how important music was to him is also confirmed by the violin that is kept today in the Jaša Bakov Bequest in the Museum of Vojvodina, in Novi Sad. Like everything else he did during his life, playing the violin was far from an amateur level. He devoted himself to it with all his heart, like everything else he ever did: learning foreign languages, of which he knew 17, coaching work, composing, journalistic work, writing songs, sports manuals, memoir texts, philosophical observations of the world in which he lived and the sport for which he he lived

If there was a train going west in Serbia, Jaša Bakov would still take it today to Paris, to sing there Marseillaise and so it becomes part of that great world circus in which only the best are remembered, and only a few events from the margins survive the passage of time and are preserved in the collective memory.