Swimming

Swimming runs through Hungarian Olympic history from the first Games to the present, with Alfréd Hajós at the start (Chapter 2) and a succession of champions since. Where water polo is a team tradition, swimming has been a story of remarkable individuals, many of them women. This chapter covers the champions, the women's team of the 1950s, the training culture and the pools that supported them. Names, dates and results are from general knowledge and flagged for checking.

From Hajós to the 1950s

After Hajós's golds in 1896, Hungarian swimmers won medals at a steady pace through the early twentieth century, helped by the growth of Budapest clubs and pools (check). The breakthrough in women's swimming came after the Second World War. At the Helsinki Games of 1952 Hungarian women won several medals, including golds (check the list), and the team became known for its quality (check).

• Éva Székely. Won gold in the 200 metres breaststroke at Helsinki in 1952 and further medals at other Games (check). She married the water polo player Dezső Gyarmati (Chapter 4, check).
• Katalin Szőke. Won the 100 metres freestyle in 1952 (check).
• Their daughter. Andrea Gyarmati, daughter of Székely and Gyarmati, won Olympic medals at the Munich Games of 1972 (check the events and medals).

Four Champions

The Training Culture

• Clubs and schools. Budapest and provincial clubs run swimming schools for children, and talented swimmers are identified early (check how it works).
• Coaching. Coaching lines, again, with respected coaches whose swimmers later became coaches (check).
• Pools. Facilities include the Hajós pool on Margaret Island, the thermal baths used for training and recovery, and indoor and open-air pools across the country (see Thermal Baths & Budapest Spa Culture 1 and 9, check what is used for training).
• The Danube. A river city with a swimming tradition, though open-water swimming in the Danube itself is not typical for training (check).

Challenges

As elsewhere, Hungarian swimming has had to face the problems of elite sport: the cost of facilities, the pull of foreign universities and the competition from larger countries with bigger programmes (check). Doping scandals in international swimming have also touched Hungary and its competitors, and the course returns to this in Chapter 8 in the Cold War context (check, and avoid assuming any individual case).

Exercises