Ervin Zádor

Ervin Zádor (born June 7, 1935 in Budapest , † April 29, 2012 in Linden , California ) was a Hungarian water polo player and swimming coach .

Ervin Zádor made 23 appearances for Hungary. He became an Olympic champion in 1956 with the Hungarian national water polo team . In the game against the Soviet Union, the blood game in Melbourne , he was so injured in the head by Valentin Prokopov shortly before the end that he had a gash on his head and was bleeding. The audience, including numerous exiled Hungarians, raged and one minute before the official end of the game, the game was abandoned when the Hungarians were 4-0.

After the Hungarian uprising was bloodily suppressed in 1956 , Zádor was one of the six players who did not return to Hungary immediately after the 1956 Olympic Games. However, Zádor was the only one who did not go back to Hungary at all. Ervin Zádor became a swimming coach in the United States and, among others, looked after the young Mark Spitz .

In spring 2006, the documentary film Freedom's Fury , produced by Lucy Liu , was premiered, which uses the person of Zádor to tell the story of the Hungarian popular uprising and the water polo crime thriller in 1956 .

Ervin Zádor, who lived in Ripon , California, was invited, like all surviving Hungarian Olympians from 1956, to a 50th anniversary celebration in Budapest in September 2006. Zádor did not go there because he did not want to be honored by a government that included people who were active in communist organizations before 1989.

literature

• Gergely Csurka / Dezső Gyarmati: 1956 - Ahol mi győztünk , Budapest 2006 ISBN 963-7046-93-3
• Erich Kamper , Bill Mallon : Who's Who of the Olympic Games 1896–1992. Who's Who at the Olympics. AGON Sportverlag, Kassel 1992, ISBN 3-928562-47-9 .

Web links

• Ervin Zádor in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )