György Sztantics

György Sztantics won the 1906 3,000 metre race walk gold after the top two finishers Robert Wilkinson of Great Britain and Eugen Spiegler of Austria were disqualified. A day before his Olympic triumph, Sztantics finished seventh and last in the 1,500 m race walk. Sztantics took up athletics in the later 1890s with Szabadkai Sportegyesület, doing a variety of events and also playing football with the club, but found his success in race walking. Besides his Olympic gold, Sztantics won the 1899 Hungarian 30 km race walk title and the 1900 Austrian 50 km race walk title. He also won the 1901 Berlin 75 km race walk. Sztantics retired from athletics after his Olympic victory and concentrated on his work as a town hall office worker in Subotica, but in 1918 died rather young due to a heart attack.

Sztantics was an ethnic Bunjevac, an ethnic group living mostly in the Bačka region of Serbia (a province of Vojvodina) and southern Hungary (Bács-Kiskun county, particularly in the Baja region). The Bunjevac speak a Serbo-Croatian dialect with Ikavian pronunciation and with certain archaic characteristics from Subotica, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,

Personal Best: 3000W – 6:49.4 (1906).