Dagmar Damkova
There are 40 female football referees in the Czech Republic but Dagmar Damkova, 33, was the very first. She is now considered to be one of the ten best female football referees in the world
Featured June 08EURO 08 REFREREE
There are 40 female football referees in the Czech Republic but Dagmar Damková, 33, was the very first. She is now considered to be one of the ten best female football referees in the world
INTERVIEW BY LUBOMIR SEDLAK
Are you attending any of the Euro 08 games this month?
Only as a fan, not a referee, since the tournament will be an exclusively male affair. But if UEFA nominates me for a match elsewhere in Europe at the same time, I may not go at all.
Is it hard to be a woman in a man's sporting world?
What better proof do you need than the fact that I cannot referee First Division men's football matches in the Czech Republic, something I was doing between October 2003 and November 2006. You must be nominated by the country's football association referee commission but when a new one was elected two years ago, it turned its back on me. I wasn't even told officially, I learnt it from a local sports journalist who phoned when I was shopping, asking me to comment on the decision. They're a bunch of male chauvinists.
Do you get spectators taunting you when you're refereering?
All the time. And the fans are much worse than the players. I mean, I can't send the fans off for swearing! Some of them can be really nasty. Expressions such as "You silly cow!" being just a gentle example. At the start of my career, when I was also working as a lineswoman (referee's assistant), the problem was even trickier; I couldn't simply move to a different part of the pitch in order not to listen to these men. I just had to grin and bear it.
When did you decide you wanted to referee soccer matches in the first place?
It started at primary school when I loved playing football with the boys. Then, at the age of 14, I had begun to play as a defender for a Plzen girls team, something I gave up six or seven years later in order to concentrate fully on refereeing. I realised that I could make a bigger career as a ref than as a player.
Does your boyfriend ever accompany you to matches?
I would not be allowed to take him along to a match abroad because it could distract me, and this strict FIFA rule actually applies to male referees as well; they have to leave their wives or partners at home. My boyfriend used to play as well as being a referee himself, so when we come home from a match, he always tells me what I was and wasn't doing right.
What do you think of the current Czech national football team?
Their game seems a little unbalanced. In the autumn they were playing well, but now, at the start of 2008, it's quite bad, so let's wait and see how they'll perform. The truth is that just qualifying to the championship is in itself a success.
PHOTOS: © VLADIMIR WEISS
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