1950s: Hungary's Golden Years of Elite Sport
Most famously, Hungary’s Aranycsapat, or “Golden” national soccer team, went undefeated from 1950-1953 under the direction of Gyula Sebes as the coach. The team’s peak occurred in 1953 with the so-called “Match of the Century,” when the Hungarians defeated the British (the inventors of football) at Wembley Stadium with a score of 6-3. Between May of 1950 and the 1956 Revolution, the team’s only loss came in 1954 from the West Germans at the World Cup; the unexpected defeat surprised the whole nation, and sparked off the largest protests in Hungary before the Revolution broke out in late October of 1956.
The fact that the small nation of ten million people found such high success on the international sport stage cannot be overlooked. It remains even more striking considering it occurred only a few years after the most devastating military conflict of all time, and during the harshest period of socialist rule
[1] The Soviets did this in other sports, such as sending their ice skaters to Czechoslovakia around the same time as the water polo team came to Hungary.