Ondrej Nepela film(s?)

[SubRosa]

While looking for videos from this week's Nepela competion, I came across some trailers for a biographical film about Ondrej Nepela. Looks like it will be released at the end of this month. People are discussing in the comments that this is one of two films about Nepela that will be coming out.

Nepela (2025) CZ HD trailer

NEPELA (2025) official teaser

I started following skating about four years after Nepela's win in Bratislava in 1973, so am not very familiar with his story and his skating. Am more familiar with Cranston and Curry from this period.

If anyone has more information about these two films, please let us know!

 

[Mathman]

Nepela was a truly remarkable talent. Here he is winning 1973 Wolds, beating the likes of Jan Hoffmann, Join Curry and Toller Cranston.

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For people who like keeping score, he got 355.60 points in this competition. This was the first time that the "new" scoring system was in effect, adding the short program and reducing somewhat the weight on figures. (For all you pups who think that the "new" scoring system means something that came around in 2003,, the world record is 335.30 points by Nathan Chen. Nepela actually only got second in both the SP and the Free Skating, but won on figures. He also won in 1972 with a score of 2722.8 points -- yes, two THOUSAND under the "old" scoring system. )

The competition was in Nepela's home country and he was a huge crowd favorite. I was tickled at the brief shot in the video of his coach, Ellen Burka -- one of the all-time influential coaches in Canadian skating history. Burka was not Czechoslovakian (she was Dutch) but she met het Czech husband when both were interred in a concentration camp in World War II.

According ton Wikipedia when she arrived at the concentration camp she discovered that the Commandant was a figure skating fan, so she called herself the figure skating champion of the Netherlands (the title did not exist at the time) and survived.