Moments of Melbourne, Part 12 - Wednesday, December 5th, 1956

From today's point of view, Agnes Keleti was far too old a gymnast when she arrived in Melbourne for the 1956 Olympic Games. But these were other times, times in which even a woman at the age of 35 could claim Olympic gold. Keleti (picture: Maccabi.org) did it four times on December 5th and 7th, becoming the most successful competitor of these Games, together with her big rival, Russia's Larissa Latynina.

While Latynina prevailed in the team and individual all-around and at the vault, Keleti came out on top at the uneven bars, the beam and with Hungary's group in the apparatus event. In the floor exercise, the two best gymnasts of their time shared the gold. When the national anthems were played, they shortly held each other's hand, thus showing some piece of good sportsmanship in contrast to the political upheaval both countries were involved in (picture: Public Record Office of Victoria).

As unique as her sporting achievements in Melbourne, so was the life of Keleti. Born of Jewish ancestors, she had to hide during World War II in Nazi occupied Hungary as a christian maid. Her father was killed in Auschwitz, her mother and sister survived the war luckily. After 1945, Keleti picked up gymnastics again and made her first impression in Helsinki in 1952, winning to silvers and a bronze. In Melbourne, it was only due to her bad performance in the vault that she could not challenge Latynina for the individual all-around title.

After Melbourne Keleti, like many other Hungarian athletes, did not return back home. She got political asylum in Australia and worked as a gymnastics teacher at the Hungarian University for a short time. Then Keleti went to Munich and in 1957 to Israel. It was there were the Jewish gymnast found a new home, teaching at the Wingate Institute near Netanya - for 29 years. Until today, she is the oldest woman to ever win Olympic gymnastics gold.

News of the day: Sweden (two), New Zealand and the USA win gold medals in yachting.  The fifth Olympic title goes to Denmark's Paul Elvstroem in th Finn Dinghy class. It is his third win in a row +++ Hungary's Rudolf Karpati earns the last fencing gold of the Games in the men's individual sabre event +++ Judith Grinham of Great Britain is the fastest female 100 meters backstroke swimmer +++ Mexican Joaquin Capila prevails in the men's platform diving +++ Romania's Stefan Petrescu wins gold in rapid-fire pistol shooting, while Canadian Gerald Ouellette scores a perfect 600 points to win the short-calibre rifle competition in the lying position.

Moments of Melbourne, Part 9 - Saturday, December 1st, 1956

Whenever Hungarian athletes competed at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, it was a highly emotional affair. The bloody ending to the revolution in their home country, caused by the invasion of Soviet tanks, earned them sympathy around the world and also in Down Under. For the Hungarian athletes in Australia, the main topic (besides competition) was the question whether to go home after the end of the Games or to emigrate to the west.

One of the most famous athletes who would finally go home again, was legendary Laszlo Papp. He made history on December 1st by becoming the first boxer to win gold at three consecutive Olympics (picture: Sportschau).

Many Hungarian team mates gathered around the ring when Papp took on American future world champion Jose Torres for his light middleweight gold medal bout - and the 30 year old veteran did not disappoint them. Although Torres gave him a hard time (picture:ORF), Papp kept his unbeaten record thanks to a split 2-1 decision by the judges. Papp had dominated this weight class four years ealier in Helsinki - after he had become middleweight champion at the first post-war Games in 1948 at London

Boxing had not been on Papp's mind all his life. As a little boy, he tried many different sports. When he took up boxing, some experts thought his hands were too small and fragile. With superb technique and strategy, Papp proved all skeptics wrong, winning not only three Olympic gold medals, but also two European championships.

The re-established communist regime of Janos Kadar rewarded Papp's return to Budapest with the allowance to become a professional. "I fight for money, but I am not greedy. How many steaks can one man eat?", he remarked ironically.  In 27 professional bouts, Papp - who lived in Vienna and got an Austrian boxing license - remained unbeaten and became European middleweight champion. But when he had a chance to box for the world championship in the Unted States, promotors did not want a "communist champion". The government's allowance was subsequently withdrawn.

Papp retired and became a renowned coach of many young Hungarian boxing hopfuls. He died in 2003. Some of the team mates who watched his final amateur bout in Melbourne on December 1st, 1956, Laszlo Papp has never met again (picture: Boxrec).

News of the day: Bantam weight boxer Wolfgang Behrendt from Berlin wins the first ever Olympic title for the German Democratic Republic (as a member of the unified German team) +++ Further Boxing gold medals go to the USSR (three), the USA and Great Britain (two each) and Romania +++ In freestyle wrestling, Turkey and Iran both grab two golds +++ On the last day of athletics, France's Alain Mimoun wins the marathon, defeating his life-long nemesis Emil Zatopek (Czechoslovakia/sixth place) +++ The USA wins both men's relays, Australia the women's sprint relay +++ Ireland's Ron Delaney surprisingly prevails in the men's 1500 meters, while Mildred McDaniel (USA) wins the women's high jump +++ Led by future NBA star Bill Russel, the US team grabs another basketball crown +++ In shooting, Wassili Borissov (USSR) wins the free rifle competition and Italy's Galliano Rossini the litter pigeons +++ Swimmer Bill Yorzik (USA) becomes the 200 meters butterfly champion, while Australia's Dawn Fraser is fastest in the women's 100 meters freestyle +++ Bob Clotworthy wins another springboard diving gold for the USA +++ In canoeing's 1000 meters finals, the gold medals are won by Romania (two), Sweden and Germany, Russia's Jelisaveta Dementijeva wins the women's 500 meters K1.

Notice: On December 2nd, 1956, no competitions were held due to Sunday sports restrictions. Our next post comes to you on December 3rd.

Moments of Melbourne, Part 1 - Thursday, November 22nd, 1956

With cannon fire and a rather slow version of Australia's most popular song, "Waltzing Matilda", Melbourne opened the 1956 Summer Olympics on a cloudy and cool Thursday afternoon. The ceremony, that started at 3:00 PM local time, had nothing of the modern day pomp and pageantry. The somber mood was apt to the politically turbulent times. Considering the backdrop of the crises in Hungary and in the Suez, many people around the globe considered it to be a success that the Games were held at all. German commentator Dr. Paul Laven wrote: "The Olympic flames saves peace on earth!" (picture: Getty)

A spirit of newness and the unusual sorrounded this opening day. Never before had the Games been staged in the southern hemisphere. Never before had an opening ceremony been held so late in the year, with most of the season virtually over for the top-tier athletes from Europe and America and Melbourne's shop windows already featuring Christmas decoration. Nevertheless, it was the Australian audience and their genuine love for sports that saved the opening day and the fortnight to come.

Queen Elizabeth had send her husband Prince Philipp, the Duke of Edinburgh, Down Under to officially declare open the Games. Before that, the parade of nations had seen the first Summer Olympics appearance of a unified team from East and West Germany. Roaring applause welcomed the team from civil war torn Hungary that had left Budapest at the height of the revolution. Many athletes were unsure about the fate of their loved ones back home when arriving at Melbourne, many were never going to go home again (picture: Getty).

Despite of the boycott by the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Egypt, Iran, and the Lebanon, 69 nations entered, equalling the record set four years earlier at Helsinki. While young Australian running hopeful Ron Clarke was almost burnt when he lit the Olympic cauldron, his mentor and hero John Landy spoke the oath for all the athletes (picture: olympics.com.au).

While a lot of things were new on this day, there was also one historic last: This opening ceremony was the last in history not to be followed live by a global TV audience. Australian TV ABC had started broadcasting just two weeks before. At the time of the opening ceremony, only 5000 television sets had been sold in the whole country. Tapes from the opening ceremony and the following competitions were carried to Sydney by car, where the footage was refurbished into daily reports. Outside of Australia, only few moving pictures could be seen - and that only three to five days later (picture: abctvgorehill.com.au).

Moments of Melbourne, Prologue - Wednesday, November 21st, 1956

Starting tomorrow, I will look back on the Melbourne 1956 Summer Olympics with daily highlights and news from 60 years ago. Today, I will begin with a prelude about the preparations.

"The friendly Games", as they were dubbed later, had a troubled preseason. Skepticism, financial bickering and political unrest marred the run up to the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. At the eve before the opening ceremony, some clouds had disappeared, but some were still hovering over the first Games in the southern hemisphere.

Melbourne had been planning her bid for the Games since 1946. In July 1949, the IOC session in Rome awarded the Olympics to the Australian metropolis with the slightest possible margin. In the fourth round of the ballot, Melbourne edged out Buenos Aires by one single vote.

What followed was - nothing. The Australians wasted almost four years of preparation time with internal feuding over money. The main point of controversy was the site of the main stadium and who should pay for it. At first, organizers planned to revamp and enlarge Melbourne Showground or Carlton Cricket Ground. But as the government of the State of Victoria declined to give money for the project, the support of the federal government and the city of Melbourne was of no use as well. The whole project was cancelled and it was mainly due to the effort of Victoria State governor John Caine that finally, Melbourne Cricket Ground was enlarged up to 120,000 seats to host the main events.

The pictures show the original design for Melbourne's Olympic stadium - and how the scene finally looked on opening day (pictures: austadiums.com/bryanpinkall.blogspot.com).

But with the stadium question answered, other problems emerged. Due to strict Australian equine quarantine laws, the equestrian events ha do to be relocated to Stockholm in 1954. Instead of staging the Games at the end of October, they had to be held in the Australian summer in November and December, raising great doubts and concerns in Europe and America.

When  IOC president Avery Brundage visited Melbourne in April 1955, he lamented about "confusion" and threatened that the Games could easily be taken away from Melbourne, e.g. to a US city or Rome, which was host of the 1960 Games and far ahead of Melbourne with her preparations. The visit had its effect on the Australians. One year later,  most problems had been solved, especially the building of an Olympic village for 6500 persons at the suburb of Heidelberg (picture: abc.net.au).

Still, the troubles for Melbourne - brilliantly portrayed in the Australian TV documentary "Lies, Spies, and Olympics" - were far from over. The crises in Hungary and at the Suez Canal in the autumn of 1956 resulted in the first wave of Olympic boycotts. Finally, Egypt, Iraq, the Lebanon, the People's Republic of China, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland stayed home for different reasons.

The rest of the world came Down Under, but outside of Australia, nobody would be able to see the events. Although domestic TV had its Olympic premiere in 1956, viewers abroad were shut out due to unsolved broadcasting rights issues. The first world wide television Games had to wait for another four years.

Melbourne 1956, "Freedom's Fury" and the Blood in the Water Saga

When Hungary remembers the 60th anniversary of the 1956 uprising this fall, you will probably see this photograph over and over again - even in international media. The picture of the bloody face of Hungarian water polo player Ervin Zador has become an icon of the revolution. And it is one of the centerpieces of - as far as I am concernd - the best sports documentary ever filmed: "Freedom's Fury" (picture: cinemaromantica.org).

The film tells the story of the water polo showdown between Hungary and the USSR at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics against the backdrop of the revolution that had been stopped by communist bloc tanks only a few weeks earlier. Hungary had been the emotional top story of these Games from the beginning, but in this water polo semifinal match on December 6th, 1956, the heat boiled over. Even Swedish referee Goesta Zuckermann, who was considered to be the best in the world, could not stop the match from turning into an ugly battle. When Russian player Valentin Prokopov knocked out Zador with Hungary leading 4-0 in the very last minutes of the game, Zuckermann broke off the battle. Hungary was declared the winner and went on to win the gold, while the Soviets had to be escorted by police from the pool to prevent a riot.

Here is the trailer of "Freedom's Fury" from 2006, together with some archive footage of the match:

"Freedom's Fury" co-producer Quentin Tarantino once called the film "the best untold story ever". Writer and director Colin Gray described his intentions as follows: "Both teams were as much a victim of the circumstances and really both countries were imprisoned by the same ideology - and these guys were able to finally reconnect as human beings and as fellow athletes. That was something that we really wanted to highlight, the sort of humanistic side to counter the sort of oppression of ideology that everyone had suffered under in the Eastern bloc."

While every observe including the media only saw the political side of the "Blood in the water match", the most astonishing part of "Freedom's Fury" is the way many players from both teams remembered the encounter half a century later. To most of them, it was somewhat just another water polo match - hard, brutal, reckless, physical, but in a way normal competitiveness or just the heat of the moment. Especially the Hungarians, many of whom defected directly from Melbourne, seemed to have mainly winning on their minds, but not revenge for the counter-revolution back home. Zador later recalled it was their game plan to provoke the Russians until they would lose their temper and hence play badly.

To wrap things up: Although "Freedom's Fury" (by the way narrated by Mark Spitz) is a political film, it somehow reminds the audience that sometimes we should not put into sports more political meaning than there really is in it.