The Left Hand

In 1939, Hungary's best pistol shooters gathered for their national championship. Among the crowd was a familiar face, a soldier named Károly Takács. The other shooters came over to greet him kindly. They thought he had come to watch.

He had not. He had come to shoot. And he was going to shoot with his left hand.

The sergeant who could not compete

Károly Takács was born in Budapest in 1910. He joined the Hungarian army, and there he found the thing he was best at in the world: shooting a pistol.

By the mid-1930s he was one of the finest rapid-fire pistol shooters anywhere. In this event, the shooter has only a few seconds to fire at a row of five targets, one after another. It needs a steady hand, sharp eyes and nerves that do not shake.

Many people expected him to shoot for Hungary at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. But, as the story is usually told, he was not allowed to. At that time Hungary's shooting team was chosen only from army officers, and Takács was a sergeant. The rule was later dropped, and he set his heart on the next Games, in 1940.

He was right-handed, and his right hand had been trained for years to do just one thing perfectly.

The accident

In 1938, during army training, a faulty hand grenade went off while Takács was holding it. His right hand, his shooting hand, was terribly injured. It could not be saved.

He spent about a month in hospital. For a man whose whole life had been built around that hand, it was a crushing loss. Friends and fellow shooters were sad for him, and assumed that his days as a sportsman were over.

Takács did not argue with them. He did not tell anyone what he was thinking. But when he left the hospital, he began to practise with his left hand.

Practising in secret

It was like starting again from the very beginning. His left hand had never held a pistol for shooting. It was weak and clumsy. It shook. It did not know how to squeeze the trigger smoothly.

So he trained it, quietly, on his own. He practised holding the pistol out at arm's length until his arm grew strong. He practised aiming, and the slow, steady pull of the trigger, over and over again. Day after day, his left hand began to learn what his right hand had known.

He kept going for months. Then he went to the national championship in 1939, the one where everyone thought he had come only to watch. He shot with his left hand, and he won.

The war years

Takács now had his eyes on the Olympics again. But the world was about to change. The Second World War began in 1939, and the Olympic Games of 1940 and 1944 were both cancelled.

For years there were no Games at all. Takács grew older. By the time the Olympics returned, in London in 1948, he was thirty-eight, and many people thought his chance had passed.

He went to London anyway.

London, 1948

The favourite in the rapid-fire pistol was Carlos Enrique Díaz Sáenz Valiente of Argentina, the reigning world champion. The story goes that when he saw Takács there, he asked the Hungarian why he had come, and Takács answered that he had come to learn.

The two men shot. When the scores were added up, Takács had won the gold medal, with a new world record. Valiente took the silver.

It is said that at the medal ceremony, the Argentine turned to him and told him he had learned enough already. Whether those were the exact words or not, the people who were there never forgot the sight: a man who had lost his shooting hand, standing on the top step of the Olympic podium.

Again, in Helsinki

Four years later, at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Takács was forty-two. He entered the rapid-fire pistol once more, and won it once more. He was the first person ever to win that event at two Olympic Games in a row.

He did not stop there. He stayed in the sport for many years as a coach, helping younger Hungarian shooters.

Károly Takács died in Budapest in 1976. In Hungary he is still remembered as a symbol of quiet determination: of what a person can do when they refuse to let one terrible moment decide the rest of their life.

Want to read more?

Károly Takács's two Olympic victories are described in David Wallechinsky's The Complete Book of the Olympics, and his results are listed on Olympics.com, the official site of the International Olympic Committee.