Seeing Red – Hungary vs. Soviet Union: Blood in the Water (Part Two)

Some people say you can never go home again. That is not always true. You can go home again, just know that nothing will be the same. This was the situation facing members of Hungary’s Olympic Water Polo team in 1956. They would face a decision when the Olympics ended. By the time the Water Polo competition in Melbourne began, almost two months had passed since the Hungarian Revolution had ended in defeat. The passage of time was not enough to heal the wounds felt by members of the team who had left family and friends behind in a country where freedom was crushed beneath the weight of Soviet tanks. All were torn between returning to an authoritarian Hungary or defecting abroad.

In retrospect, the decision seems a no brainer. Why would anyone want to return to an authoritarian country when the prospect of freedom was as close as the nearest embassy. By leaving, they would risk never seeing family or friends again. Their hopes of playing water polo in international competitions would fade. Training for the highest levels of competition had been all these athletes knew. They would also lose the fringe benefits (housing, cars) that came with being an elite Olympic athlete in a communist country. Thus, a decision to defect would not be an easy one, but before that could or would happen there was a gold medal to win.

Blood sport – Ervin Zador after the Hungary-Soviet Union match at the 1956 Olympics (Credit: Olympic Photo Association)

Grudge Match – Fighting for Supremacy
In the 1956 Olympics, Hungary’s Water Polo team may have been the best in the world and favored to win the gold medal, but they would later admit to being distracted in the early rounds of the Olympic competition. That did not stop them from implementing a new strategy. The Hungarians packed into a zone on defense, then as soon as an opportunity presented itself, they would launch a ferocious counterattack. This strategy proved incredibly successful as they won their first four games by a combined score of 20 – 3 to get them through to the semifinals. The team’s newest star, Ervin Zador shined. He was a youthful addition to the veteran squad. Picked up from a local team, Zador quickly proved to be one of the world’s top players. The Hungarians would need Zador and all their skill as they prepared to face off against the Soviet Union’s team.

The Soviets were newcomers to the top echelons of the sport. They had not come anywhere close to contending for a medal at the 1952 Olympics, finishing seventh that year. The Soviet team had managed to improve since then by studying the Hungarians. The team traveled to Hungary, where they learned from the world’s best. This had already led to a fierce rivalry. Six months before the Olympics, Hungary played the Soviet team in an away game that turned into a brawl, both in the pool and the locker room afterwards. The enmity between the two teams grew after the Hungarian Revolution. The Olympic semifinal between the two teams would be a grudge match. Adding to the tension was a Hungarian expatriate community in Melbourne that was ready to pour vitriol on the Soviets as soon as they entered the pool.

Another battlefield – Water Polo match at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics

A Pool of Blood – Violent Tendencies
Ironically, while the Soviet team carried the label of bad guys going into the game, the Hungarians would be more pugnacious to start. Part of this was personal, the other part strategic. The Hungarian players planned to use insults that would infuriate the Soviet players. Their reasoning was that if the Soviets got angry, then they would lose focus on the match. The Hungarian players had an advantage in this respect. Schools in Hungary taught the Russian language. Thus, the Hungarian could taunt the Russians using their own words. The Hungarian strategy worked from the outset. The game had barely begun when a Russian player reacted to the barrage of verbal taunts. He would be the first of many players to spend time in the penalty box. While the Hungarians referred to their opponents using a range of expletives, the Soviets called the Hungarians “traitors.” The physical nature of the match was difficult for the referees to control. All they could see was what went on above the waterline which at times turned into a near melee. Under the water, players engaged in brutal kicks and punches.

The Hungarian squad stuck to their strategy and outplayed the Soviets, scoring four goals, including two by Zador, while allowing none. With a minute left in the game, Zador heard a whistle blow. When he turned to look at the referee, Soviet player Valentin Prokopov, who he had been trading insults with throughout the match, slugged him. The punch knocked Zador momentarily senseless. Blood started streaming from a cut just above his eye and poured into the water. The pro-Hungarian crowd outraged at this blatant act of violence charged out of the stands and surrounded the pool. Suddenly, the referees had a near riot on their hands. A crowd of 5,000 angry spectators was seeing red, both literally and figuratively. The referees called the game over. Police then escorted the Soviet players to safety. Meanwhile, a photographer snapped a picture of Zador with blood around his eye and streaming down his face. This iconic image damned the Soviets as the bad guys when it came to their treatment of Hungarians.

Headliner – Front page of The Sun newspaper (Credit: National Library of Australia)

Zador’s Fate – Magyar Martyrdom
Ervin Zador instantly became a martyr for the Hungarian cause. This would do nothing to heal the pain he felt in the coming days. He lost his opportunity to play in the gold medal match against Yugoslavia due to the injury. He could only watch as Hungary eked out a 2 -1 win to take home the gold medal. The only problem was that half of the Hungarian Water Polo team and associated delegation would not be returning home. Zador was one of those. At the gold medal ceremony, tears ran from his injured eye. Soon thereafter, he emigrated to the United States. Cold War conflicts cut short a brilliant water polo. The Hungarians may have lost the revolution, but they fared better in the Olympics. Their 1956 Water Polo team not only won a gold medal, in the process they won over the free world. For that, they will always be champions.

Click here for: After the Revolution – Hungary vs. the Soviet Union: Blood in the Water (Part One)

After the Revolution – Hungary vs. the Soviet Union: Blood in the Water (Part One)

The Cold War was a global conflict fought all over the world. The political, economic, military, and cultural spheres were contested spaces. On one side were the democratic capitalist countries led by the United States, on the other were totalitarian communist ones led by the Soviet Union. Try as they might, nations could not avoid taking sides. Even not taking sides, meant taking a side, hence the Non-Aligned movement. Eastern Europe was at the epicenter of this geopolitical tug of war. This was true both externally and internally. The enemy was within as much as without, especially when it came to communist countries.

Golden Boys – Hungary’s 1956 Olympic Water Polo team

The Sporting Arena – Spheres of Influence
Quite often, Cold War cultural battles occurred in the sporting arena, primarily at the Olympic Games. Many can still remember watching the Soviet Union defeat the United States in basketball during a highly controversial finish at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich or the United States Men’s Hockey Team’s “Miracle on Ice” upset of the supposedly invincible Soviet team at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. There were always suspicions about steroid use and blood doping (the East German women’s swimming team to name but one example) that added an element of intrigue. Judging of competitions in boxing and figure skating were often scrutinized. Many believed the fix was in if their side failed to emerge triumphant.

There were also times when a singular performance such as those of the gymnasts Olga Korbut (Soviet Union) and Nadia Comaneci (Romania) helped break down barriers and unify people in agreement that they were witnessing something close to perfection. Less often remarked upon was that many of the countries in the Eastern Bloc were at times competing as much with their own side as they were with athletes and teams from western countries. The most dramatic of these internal competitions occurred in a water polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne. A semifinal match of such infamy that it has become forever known as the Blood in the Water match.

Taking to the street – Hungarian revolutionaries in Budapest (Credit: ETH Bibliotek)

Uprising – Fighting for Freedom
During the final week of October 1956, the Hungarian Revolution broke out in Budapest. It began with a student revolt against the hardline communism that had been imposed upon the nation since World War II. The flames of freedom spread like wildfire throughout the city and soon tens of thousands were joining the movement to liberate Hungary from communist rule. After a week, it looked like the revolution would succeed as Soviet troops had been forced to retreat. Soldiers in the Hungarian army had either given their weapons to the revolutionaries or joined them. The members of Hungary’s Olympic Water Polo Team knew a revolution was in the works. While at a training camp in the mountains not far from Budapest, they could see smoke from street battles rising into the sky.

Before they could learn many details, the 100 members of the team left for another training camp in Czechoslovakia. This would be their final stop prior to departure for Melbourne, where the summer Olympics would take place amid an Australian summer. The Hungarian Water Polo team had no idea that the full fury and might of the Red Army had descended upon Budapest in the first week of November. The Hungarian rebels’ small arms and homemade bombs were no match for the tanks, artillery, and heavy armor of the Soviet forces. The revolution was crushed in a matter of days with hundreds dying in the fighting and tens of thousands fleeing abroad. Totalitarian rule was once again imposed upon the country as mass arrests of anyone who was even loosely connected to the revolution were soon made.

Pooling their resources – Scene from Hungary Water Polo match at 1956 Olympics

Golden Boys – Catching a Wave
Meanwhile, the Hungarian Water Polo team was sequestered in training. They would not learn what had occurred until their arrival in Australia. One member of the team who was fluent in English got his hands on a Melbourne newspaper. He read an article about the revolution being crushed aloud to the team.  Right then, many decided that following the Olympics they would defect rather than return to Hungary. All were worried what might have happened to family members and friends back home. While this served as a major distraction in their efforts to win the gold medal, it also fueled their will to succeed. It also set the stage for the match they wanted more than any other, against a vastly improved Soviet team, one that hoped to take away the Olympic crown from the world’s greatest water polo playing nation.

By 1956, Hungary and water polo excellence had become synonymous. The Hungarian team had won three of the last four Olympic titles and finished runner-up in another one. The Olympic golds were won both before and after World War II, under both left- and right-wing authoritarian governments. The world’s best teams were no match for Hungarian supremacy in the world of water polo. Coming into the 1956 Olympics, Hungary were the defending champions. They had dominated the competition at Helsinki in 1952 where they won seven of 10 games and tied in the other three. Their greatest competition had traditionally come from the Italian and Yugoslav teams. The Soviet Union was now beginning to show vast improvement. They had placed seventh at their first Olympic competition in Helsinki. Now they threatened Hungary’s reign as the world’s best.

Pooling their resources – Scene from Hungary Water Polo match at 1956 Olympics

Fighting Back – A Resistance Mentality
Any sporting competition between Hungary and the Soviet Union was fraught with emotion. Water polo, which is an intensely physical game, made it more so. Even before the Revolution, Hungary had been a less than welcoming place for the Soviet team. At one tournament, the crowd turned their backs while the Soviets were being introduced. Hungary may have been east of the Iron Curtain, but its people chafed under Soviet rule. There were not many ways that Hungarians could show their disapproval of communism, but sports were one of them. The water polo team channeled a resistance mentality to fuel their determination. The Hungarians might not be able to defeat the Soviet Union in a military conflict, but in an Olympic sized swimming pool they could meet any challenge.

Click here for: Seeing Red – Hungary vs. Soviet Union: Blood in the Water (Part Two)