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Why Puskás was declared dead in 1956

14 Nov. 2019.

Legendary Hungarian forward Ferenc Puskás passed away in 2006, but he'd already been reported dead in the worldwide media 50 years earlier in 1956. We explain why.

October 24th 1956 - while those Hungarian sportspeople who were preparing for the Melbourne Olympic Games were residing in the Red Star hotel at Svábhegy, a group of State Secret Police opened fire randomly at a crowd of people who had gathered in Szófia utca to burn communist books.

Népszava, 1956. október 30., kedd (Fotó: Player.hu)

Right at that moment, Hungarian-champion pentathlete István Hegedüs was shot as he tried to enter the swimming-pool building and died at the scene. 

A futballtörténelem egyik legjobb válogatottjának története 1956-ban ért véget

After this, it happened more than once that one could in the newspapers sympathetic to the revolutionaries that sportspeople who had been preparing for the Olympic Games had fallen in the fighting, even though most hadn't even been holding a gun. Of those who did pick up a weapon, arról pont nem pletykáltak. One such example was Zoltán Czibor, the Golden Team's genius of a winger, who hadn't just been tagging along with the revolutionary army but who had actually patrolled Buda with a loaded gun (although he said he never used it) and maintained contact with certain revolutionaries too. This played a major part in him not returning home in January 1957 after his Honvéd football team's tour of South America. If he had, perhaps even his status as a Golden Team player wouldn't have helped save him from execution (original text taken from Player.hu).

Czibor Zoltán

Firstly it was Olympic-champion hammer-thrower József Csermák then pentathlete Gábor Benedek who were rumoured on the streets and in the Press to have become martyrs in the Uprising. before the nation's 'little brother' Ferenc Puskás had also become a victim. Then came the refutations.