Károly Takács

Károly Takács was a sergeant in the Hungarian army and, by the mid-1930s, one of the best rapid-fire pistol shooters in the world. He was not selected for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, reportedly because only commissioned officers were permitted on the team. He expected to go to Tokyo in 1940 instead.

In 1938, during a training exercise, a defective grenade exploded in his right hand and destroyed it. He spent a month in hospital. Nobody expected him to shoot again, and he told nobody what he intended to do. He simply started practising with his left hand, alone, working through the pain and the awkwardness of learning to hold and fire a pistol with the wrong hand. The following spring he turned up at the Hungarian national championships, where his colleagues assumed he had come to watch. He entered and won.

He was part of the Hungarian team that won the world championship in 1939, and then the war closed everything down. The 1940 and 1944 Games were cancelled.

At the London Olympics of 1948 he was 38. He won the 25 metre rapid-fire pistol event with a world record, beating the Argentine favourite, who had reportedly asked him before the competition why he was there. In Helsinki four years later he won again. He kept shooting into his fifties and coached the next generation of Hungarian shooters.