Athletes Behaving Badly

Cases 3 & 4: Members of the Olympic Revolutionary Committee

The Melbourne Olympic Games began a mere two weeks after the 1956 Revolution ended. The athletes themselves did not find out about the Soviet invasion and crushing of the rebellion until after they arrived in Australia. Many of the athletes at that point decided not to return to Hungary.[1] The Hungarian Olympic team formed a Revolutionary Committee as a sort of sport counterpart to the numerous revolutionary committees and councils that were created during the Revolution itself.  
 
Two of the elected leaders of the Revolutionary committee were pentathlete Gábor Benedek and water polo player Dezső Gyarmati. Both of them were punished upon their return to Hungary. Bender (shown above) had won a gold medal at the 1952 Olympics, and was the champion at the 1954 World Pentathlon Championships. When he returned to Hungary after Melbourne, he was forced into retirement by the Hungarian Physical Education and Sport, and stripped of his privileges. By 1959 he was allowed to begin training young pentathletes, several of whom went on to have enormously successful careers. He ended up defecting to West Germany in 1969.
 
Dezső Gyarmati's life (shown above) went quite differently. He defected briefly to the United States with his wife, the highly successful swimmer Éva Szekély. After touring the States with the help of Sports Illustrated magazine, they returned to Hungary in 1957. He faced a 1-year suspension from competitive sport. Gyarmati rejoined the national team in 1958, and competed for Hungary at the 1960 Rome Olympics. After retiring, he became the coach of the national water polo team in the mid-1970s. His career peaked in 1976, when the Hungarian men’s water polo team won the gold medal at the Montreal Olympics that year. Rather than be relegated to the background (like Benedek), Gyarmati is still considered the best Hungarian water polo player of all time.
 
[1] Freedom’s Fury, documentary, 2006.

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