Nick Itkin is an American athlete born in Los Angeles in 1999. Itkin competes in fencing, is a specialist in foil, and before the Paris Olympics, had participated in two Summer Olympic Games, obtaining two bronze medals, and in Tokyo 2020 in the team event.
Throughout his career he won three medals at the World Fencing Championships and three gold medals at the Pan American Games, in 2019 and 2023.
This week, the fencer achieved the historic feat of becoming the first Jewish athlete to win a medal at the Paris Olympics in fencing, taking bronze for the United States.
Itkin has already secured third place in the competition men's epee individual by defeating the Japanese Kazuki Iimura, with a final score of 15-12.
This is the third épée medal for the US team in Paris, following the gold and silver medals of Lee Kiefer and Lauren Scruggs in the women's category.
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE JEWISH PEOPLE AND IRANIAN PEOPLE, UNITED WITH THE JEWISH PEOPLE BLESSING ISRAEL AND IDF. AMEN.
Please do your research well because I am almost sure that a Hungarian of Jewish origin won a gold medal in fencing at the Olympics.
User Consent Prompt
Focus Prompt
Main
Last minute
Discover
Sections
Profile
Olympics
Olympic Games26/07/2021Arrive in Català
Verified translation
The Olympic champion who disappeared during the war
Endre Kabos, a Hungarian Jew, won a gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Games
Toni Padilla
2 min
Endre Kabos, fencing champion in 1936.EFE
Arrive in Catala
Barcelona Margaret Bridge, in Budapest, does not have a good reputation. Designed by two French architects in the mid-2011th century, when the cities of Buda and Pest, separated by the Danube, were joined with bridges to become a modern city, it was chosen by all citizens who decided to take their own lives. From time to time, someone would jump into the water, either to escape heartbreak or debt. The bridge gained such a bad reputation that the poet János Arany dedicated a poem to those lost souls who said goodbye to life there, in the north of Budapest. In XNUMX, the bridge was in such poor condition that the authorities went out of their way to redo it from top to bottom. And during the works, human bones appeared. Analyzing the DNA, some were identified as those of Endre Kabos, one of the best Hungarian athletes in history.
Kabos, born in 1906 in Oradea, a then Hungarian city now part of Romania, was Jewish. As a young man he came to Budapest, where he excelled in one of the numerous sports in which Hungarians, a multi-sports land with great tradition, shine: fencing. In the 30s he won so many medals that he couldn't fit them in a single room. In 1932 he won Olympic gold in Los Angeles, but at home things were no longer going well for him. Hungary, then a land where a good part of the population was Jewish, was leaning towards populism, towards the right. And the Jews, who had euphorically joined Hungarian nationalism at the end of the 1936th century, were beginning to be mistreated. Kabos eventually left the sport, fed up, even though many friends helped him and in XNUMX he was able to go to Berlin to win another gold in saber right under the noses of the Nazi authorities. Unlike other Jewish athletes who won medals in those Games, he did not remain silent. "I compete for the honor of Hungary and Jewish athletes, to make clear what Jewish athletes are like."
Loading
Ad
With the start of World War II, Kabos was forcibly sent to a military camp to teach Hungarian soldiers how to use the saber and bayonet. The Hungarian regime, an ally of Hitler, persecuted the Jews, but did not send them to the extermination camps until 1944, at the end of the war. And Kabos, thanks to his contacts in the world of sports, avoided getting on the trains. Some say that he joined the resistance, others that with a false identity he had ended up as a Nazi labor force. Be that as it may, a few days before the end of the war, when the noise of Soviet tanks could already be heard in the center of Budapest, Kabos was crossing the Margaret Bridge on a cart when the bridge exploded. The Nazis had planned to blow it up before the Soviets arrived, but the mines exploded earlier by mistake, when hundreds of people were crossing the bridge. One of them was Kabos. The luck he had always had abandoned him when he already imagined himself surviving the war.
See 1 comment
Content created by
Toni Padilla
Toni Padilla
More from the section
Olympic Games
Competing in the Games seven months pregnant: the five Olympic rings of the day
Sports / Olympic Games | 31/07/2024
Mar Molné, from shooting to win hams to staying on the edge of the Olympic podium
Sports / Olympic Games | 31/07/2024
Sena finally hosts the triathlon, but we don't like it: "They have teased us"
Sports / Olympic Games | 31/07/2024
The two Chinese ladies who met again three decades later as Olympians
Sports / Olympic Games | 31/07/2024
Olympics
Support quality and rigor information. We all do the ARA.
Ways to Give
Free and committed journalism, to be well informed
Subscribe
App:
IOS
Android
© ARA 2024
Privacy
Terms
Partners