Athletes Behaving Badly

1950s: Hungary's Golden Years of Elite Sport

The sport system between 1948-1953 produced the most successful group of Hungarian athletes of all time. At the 1948 and 1952 Summer Olympic Games, the Hungarian team won the fourth and third-most medals out of all the participating nations. Athletes in many sports brought Olympic victories to the socialist state during this time as well. The national water polo team, having won an incredible four Olympic championship titles between 1932-1956, earned the last two at the 1952 and 1956 Games. The Hungarian team proved so impressive that the Soviets sent their team to Budapest between 1954-1955 to learn the Hungarian coaches’ training and fitness techniques.[1] Hungarian athletes in swimming, boxing, fencing and modern pentathlon won numerous other Olympic and World Championship victories.


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.

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