The year 1980, to which this book is dedicated, was a year of great sporting events, but also of inconspicuous but all the more significant political shifts. After all, politics also intervened in the aforementioned sport - the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow were boycotted by a number of Western countries in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

At the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, a team of American university students defeats the Soviet Union's team in the finals and thus takes care of the so-called miracle on ice, which Americans still remember. Czechoslovak tennis players win the Davis Cup for the first time and the Spartakiad culminates in Prague at the Strahov Stadium – at the time the largest stadium in the world.

The highway from Prague to Bratislava is completed and the last tram will pass from the Museum to the Bridge. The film legend Vrchní, prchni! is coming to cinemas today. and the TV series Arabela starts. Jan Werich dies and John Lennon is murdered in New York.

Smallpox has been definitively eradicated from the world. Millions fall into Rubik's Cube madness and Zimbabwe gains independence. The trade union Solidarita is born in the shipyards in Gdańsk, Poland, and the electrician Lech Wałęsa is elected as its leader. Although the fall of the Iron Curtain is still far away, this is the first step towards the revolutions of 1989.

So let's remember together the year when a second became a second, when the Deli bar started being produced in the Modřany Chocolate Factory and when Harry Potter was born...