Trafalgar Park Rink to Be Named After Otto Jelinek

The ice at Trafalgar Park Community Centre on Rebecca Street will carry the name of the skater who trained on it as a boy. Oakville council voted unanimously on September 8 to name it the Otto Jelinek rink, three days after Jelinek died at 86.

Jelinek was born in Prague in 1940 and came to Oakville with his family in 1948 after they fled communist Czechoslovakia. He went to Appleby College and Oakville Trafalgar High School, and he and his sister Maria started competing with the Oakville Skating Club, practising at the Rebecca Street rink that will now bear his name.

The pair skated for Canada at the 1960 Olympics. Two years later they won the world pairs title, and they won it in Prague, the city the family had left as children. Jelinek later started a company making hockey and figure skates.

Politics came next. He won a Toronto-area seat for the Progressive Conservatives in 1972, then represented Oakville and Milton voters as MP for Halton from 1979 to 1988, holding cabinet posts that included Minister of State for Fitness and Amateur Sport. He moved back to Prague for a business career, was appointed Canadian ambassador to the Czech Republic in 2013, and returned to Oakville after that posting.

His family says he lived with Parkinson's disease for the last 20 years of his life. He died peacefully in hospital on September 5.