Bizarre Czech mixed martial arts pay-per-view program "Clash of the Stars" features fighter with criminal record who spouts antigypsyist rhetoric
Czech bodybuilder Filip Grznár has rejected a challenge from Jaroslav Kotlár, founder of the firm Kotlár Security, to fight him as part of the “Clash of the Stars” pay-per-view series of bizarre mixed martial arts (MMA) matches between social media “influencers” and other strange minor personages from the Czech-language Internet. Kotlár had posted the following to Facebook about Grznár and also made a video of the message: “Hi. Greetings to all my friends out there. Is there anybody here who could help arrange a match with this fool, please? I hope he will accept my challenge. I am dead serious. Filip Grznár really needs somebody to teach him a lesson. Čáwo Dynamic wasn’t able to do it, but I’m here and I’m ready to give him what he needs with all my heart, so please get in touch. Thanks.”
Kotlár was reacting to a match in which Grznár defeated the Romani musician Adam “Dynamic” Josef. Grznár refused the challenge as follows: “I’d like to respond here to the challenge from Mr. Kotlár because everybody keeps sending it to me like crazy… I’m not interested. Friends, I’ll be 40 in two years, or almost three. I cannot fight, I refuse to fight somebody whose IQ is the same as that. It’s just not possible.”
“As far as Roma go, or as I call them, cigáni – no offense, that’s just how they’re called – it all keeps going round and around like a perpetuum mobile. You beat one, then another challenges you, it just goes round and around. I’m ending it now. I will not be fighting any cigáni, it’s just not possible because it keeps being used against me,” the bodybuilder said.
Grznár had previously defeated Jaroslav Oláh, a disc jockey for the online Roma Rádio station and singer, in yet another bizarre MMA duel, and in a post-match interview did not refrain from making more of his racist verbal attacks on Romani people, which he then tried to walk back in a follow-up Instagram post. That match took place as part of an “I AM Fighter” tour, the main promoter for which is a formerly active member of the neo-Nazi “National Resistance” group, Petr Píno Ondruš.
Grznár, racism, and support for the war on Ukraine
Grznár has previously been convicted of committing violence against a group or its individual members and for approving of a crime because he publicly expressed opinions that were racist, for which he was fined CZK 15,000 [EUR 610]. More than three years ago he made a video of himself approving of the murder of a Romani man on a Chomutov housing estate and threatening to massacre other Romani people.
“Some cikán drove a car into people and harmed somebody. One person defended himself there by taking his legally-held 9mm and shooting [the driver] dead. He did the right thing. The problem is that the fucking Czech justice system will send him behind bars pretty fast, it’s terrible. The cikáni want to stir up unrest here and are threatening the guy’s family. If they do that, I will go to Chomutov for those cikáni. I’ll kill it,” the bodybuilder literally said in the video.
Grznár has also been investigated by police over his support for Russia, which has been brazenly furthering its occupation of the sovereign country of Ukraine since February. The bodybuilder posted videos to social media in March in which he approved of that aggression.
In one recording Grznár even said he is looking forward to the war coming to the Czech Republic because then it will be possible to just kill anybody. “I want there to be a war in the Czech Republic,” he told the camera in a video posted to Instagram.
“I want it, let Russia come for us already,” Grznár says in the recording, adding that he absolutely does not care what might happen to him, his family or anybody else. Prosecutors halted his prosecution for that content at the beginning of June.
