There was much more than a place in an Olympic final at stake when Hungary took on the country that just invaded their own

These are the facts: on 6 December 1956 Hungary and the Soviet Union contested a water polo semi-final that has earned a place in infamy, an occasion that seethed with threatened or actual violence from the first minute and ended in chaos after Hungary’s young attacking prodigy Ervin Zador was taken, bleeding, out of the pool and straight to the medical room.

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A sporting occasion is nominally an opportunity for one or several sportspeople simply to prove their superiority over one or several others. The only question, in theory, is who can go furthest, highest or fastest. But it is rarely as simple as that, and sometimes history or circumstance confers a heavy subtext on to a fixture. Rarely can a sporting occasion have been laden with as much subtext as this.

Seven years after Hungary fell formally under Soviet control, any meeting between representatives of the two nations would naturally be lent extra significance. More in water polo, perhaps, than anything else: Hungary was the game’s great superpower, having won three of the previous four Olympic gold medals and a silver in London in 1948. At the 1952 Games, the Russians watched Hungary win yet again after themselves finishing a humiliating seventh. And so, as they worked on improving their chances for 1956, the Soviets landed on an unusual solution: given that they essentially owned Hungary, they would simply send their own team to benefit from Hungary’s unique, and uniquely successful, training regime.

“At that point in time they were our idols, they were significantly better than us,” Viktor Ageyev, a member of the Soviet team, told the makers of the 2006 film Freedom’s Fury, a documentary, produced by Quentin Tarantino and Lucy Liu, that told the story of the match. “I thought, ‘My God, how are we going to play against this team?’” Hungary’s Istvan Hevesi recalled: “They wrote down everything we did. The next day they did the same thing we did. They copied us.”

Several months before the Games, the two teams met again in a warm-up tournament in Moscow. The home side controversially won, allegedly thanks to some extremely generous refereeing on the part of a Muscovite official, and after the match the two sides enjoyed a memorable dressing-room punch-up. At another match in Hungary fans turned their backs as the Russians were introduced, and drowned out their national anthem. Had there been no more to the match than this, there would have been needle enough. But there was much, much more.

There’s no way of doing this without a bit of history, but if you know your Hungarian revolution you may want to skip a few paragraphs. If you find this insufficient, there’s always Wikipedia. If you fall somewhere in the middle, the best place to start is 1955, when Hungary’s populist, reformist prime minister, Imre Nagy, who had encouraged his country to dream of a bright, post-communist future following the death of Stalin two years earlier, was sacked after falling out of favour with Moscow. By then, though, there was growing appetite for change, which Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev encouraged in a speech early the following year.

That October, with Hungary still governed by a hardline Soviet regime, students in Budapest organised a protest. On 22 October – precisely one month before the opening ceremony was to take place in Melbourne – they took to the streets. By the end of the day an estimated 200,000 people were involved, and police, not really used to people voicing opinions or exercising free will, opened fire in an attempt to disperse the crowd. Violence broke out, and although Nagy was brought back as prime minister the following day, protests continued across the country.

Hungary’s Olympians, meanwhile, were sequestered in a large house just outside Budapest, close enough to hear the gunfire, wondering what the future might hold. On 30 October Nagy declared that they were to travel to Australia, where they would represent a free Hungary. But the country was relying on international support to stop the Soviets from suppressing their bid for freedom and on that same day, fatefully, the Suez crisis escalated, with Britain, France and Israel beginning their invasion of Egypt. Nagy pushed on and on 1 November, as the athletes headed to Yugoslavia, the first leg of a tortuous three-week journey, he withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and declared the country’s intention to seek independence. The athletes left with the revolution apparently successful.

They heard no more news until their arrival in Melbourne on 20 November. Miklos Martin was the only member of the team who spoke English, and the others huddled round while he translated the latest from a newspaper: the Soviet Union had invaded, the resistance had been crushed, more than 3,000 Hungarians had died. Two days later, on the day of the opening ceremony, Nagy was arrested by Soviet forces; he would be tried, in secret, for treason and hanged. Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands boycotted the Olympics altogether in protest at the Soviet invasion (while Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq stayed away because of Suez).

By now it was a month since the Hungarians last dipped a toe in a swimming pool. One of their players, Kalman Markovits, had developed a zonal marking system, quite revolutionary for its time, and his team-mates resolved to try it. They beat the USA 6-2 in their first group game, and then thrashed both Germany and Italy 4-0. The system had worked, and brought them a semi-final against the Soviet Union. For many members of the team, the occasion was all about revenge. “They began to shoot us, those bastards,” said Hevesi. “The fire inside us was beating so strongly. God help us, we’ll beat them for sure.”

The occasion drew a capacity crowd, swelled with members of Melbourne’s large Hungarian community. The atmosphere was fraught from the start. “We felt we were playing for Hungary,” Zador told the BBC’s Sporting Witness (still available on iPlayer) last summer. “The Hungarians there were so charged, and there was such deep hostility for all the things they did to our country since 1945, that all these people in Australia just went absolutely berserk.”

According to Zador the Hungarians resolved to avoid fights, but decided that they should do their best to wind up their opponents. “We figured if they were going to get angry they’re going to start to fight, and once they fight they won’t play well, and if they don’t play well we will beat them, and if we beat them we would win the Olympics,” he said.

The plan worked. It took less than a minute for the first Russian player to react, and get sent to the penalty box. Two more were to follow (plus a couple of Hungarians). Russia’s own sense of injustice built as Hungary’s captain, Dezso Gyarmati, gave his side the lead from a twice-taken penalty, and their frustration grew as Hungary gradually accumulated a 4-0 lead while they struggled to break down their opponents’ zonal defence. Plus, there was the continued provocation. “We were yelling at them, ‘You dirty bastards. You come over and bomb our country,’” Zador recalled. “They were calling us traitors. There was fighting above the water and fighting beneath the water.”

With two minutes to play, Zandor was asked to mark the Soviet Union’s Valentin Prokopov. “I said, ‘No problem. I can handle him,’” said Zador. “I’ll tell him he’s a loser and his mother’s a loser and everything else. I’ll say the game’s over and you’re just a sorry-assed loser, and that’s it.” Prokopov was perhaps his country’s finest player of the 1950s, but he will forever be remembered for what happened next. With Zador’s attention drawn to the other side of the pool by the referee’s whistle he rose out of the water and smote Zador with a vicious blow to the face. “I turn round to see him windmilling,” said Zador. “I saw that arm coming in my face, and I heard the crack, and suddenly I saw I think 48 stars. Man oh man, I was just like a stuffed pig!”

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Blood poured from Zador’s split cheek as he was pulled from the pool. Members of the crowd, sitting just a couple of yards from pool side, jumped over the barriers and attempted to exact revenge on the Soviets. Police, primed for possible violence, immediately descended in numbers. As the crowd shouted “Hajra Magyarok!” – “Go Hungary!” – and threw missiles at the Russian players, the Swedish referee – not that anyone could hear him – decided that he would prefer to be somewhere else and blew the final whistle.

Zador’s split and swollen cheek forced him to sit out the final, against Yugoslavia the following day, which Hungary won 2-1. He collected his gold medal, in civvies, and wept for the smouldering, broken country he had left behind, forever. He and about half of his team-mates sought asylum, rather than returning to live through Hungary’s uncertain future (even though, as glorious gold medallists, their individual futures would have been secure). Instead he headed for America where he was to become – and still, at 76, continues to be – a swimming coach. It wasn’t his last brush with Olympic glory, though: in the 1960s he coached a talented teenager who turned out to be quite good, by the name of Mark Spitz.

What happened next

Pictures of Ervin Zador’s injuries were published around the world, which led to the Blood in the Water name. Hungary beat Yugoslavia 2-1 in the final to win their fourth Olympic gold medal. Zador left for San Francisco, where he gave up water polo entirely due to the low standard in the US and became a swimming coach. The match itself has been captured in two films: Children of Glory and Freedom’s Fury.

What Ervin Zador said

“I turned back and with a straight arm, he just smacked me in the face. He tried to punch me out … I felt warm blood pouring down. We felt we were playing not just for ourselves but for our whole country. We were yelling at them, ‘You dirty bastards. you come over and bomb our country,’ They were calling us traitors. There was fighting above the water and fighting beneath the water.”