The 1956 Summer Games is sometimes called the “Friendly Games,” although there was also a water polo match that was anything but friendly.
Today it’s known as the “Blood In The Water” match.
The Summer Games were held in Melbourne, Australia in 1956, so they took place in late November and early December.
This match took place on December 6, 1956, and it was a semi-final in water polo between Hungary and the Soviet Union.
Technically those two countries were on the same side of the Cold War, but there’s a whole lot of backstory here that explains why these two teams were at each others’ throats.
In the 1950s, the Soviet Union was one of the world’s superpowers, and it considered Hungary one of its satellite states.
In water polo, Hungary had been the team to beat for decades, and when the USSR decided it wanted to be number one, it told Team Hungary that it was sending its water polo players and they were expected to share all their pro tips.
Team Hungary did not love this, and things got tense.
When the two teams played in a tournament in Moscow, the Soviet team won, though it’s said they got plenty of help from the referee.
The two teams fought in the locker room afterward.
This wasn’t the only fighting between the two countries.
There had been student protests in Hungary, hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets, and a reformist prime minister tried to pull the country out of the Soviet sphere of influence.
The Soviets sent in troops and ended the resistance movement with deadly force, killing thousands.
Team Hungary decided to use the Olympics to make a statement about the plight of their people.
And they got their chance, winning their way to a semi-final match against the Soviets.
The Hungarians not only outplayed their opponents, they made a point of riling them up, shouting at them about the crackdown back home until the Soviets got mad and ended up in the penalty box.
Team USSR started jawing back, and soon words turned to fists.
Eventually one of the top Soviet players clobbered one of the top Hungarian players in the face, splitting his cheek after the ref’s whistle.
The bloody photos of the effects of that punch went all over the world, though technically the blood wasn’t in the water.
Hungarian fans weren’t interested in technicalities, of course; they were mad enough to try to rush poolside to get at the Soviet player.
Police had to step in, and the referee ended the match early and awarded it to Hungary.
Their team did end up winning the gold medal, though maybe their bigger statement came afterward, when about half of the winning team defected to the United States.
Back in 2011, security officials reported that a spam text had stopped a terrorist attack.
Authorities say a terror group wanted the suicide bomber to reach a square in central Moscow, at which point another operative would text her to set off a remote detonator.
But before she’d left the safe house, she unexpectedly got a “happy new year” text from the mobile company, and that was that.
50 stunning Olympic moments No7: Hungary v Soviet Union: blood in the water (The Guardian)
Suicide bomber blown up prematurely by spam text (News.com.au)
