Béla Rerrich

Béla Rerrich competed in three Olympics for Hungary as a fencer, his last in 1956. After the Melbourne Olympics, he defected to the United States, as did many Hungarian Olympians in response to the Soviet repression of the Hungarian October Revolution. Fluent in six languages, he took a government job in Washington, DC, but he was concerned about an escalation of the Cold War and moved to Scandanavia where he worked as a fencing coach and became close to the Swedish royal family. Outspoken, when the 1956 Hungarian Olympians were on a tour in the United States arranged by Sports Illustrated magazine, he noted courageously, “Russians would have worked for years to arrange this.”