Budapest – The world’s oldest Olympic champion, Sandor Tarics, has died at the age of 102 in San Francisco, the Hungarian Olympic Committee MOB said on its website on Saturday, citing information from the family.
Tarics was member of the Hungarian water polo team which won at the Berlin Olympics staged by the Nazi government in 1936, pushing Germany into second place.
He left Soviet-occupied Hungary to settle in the United States in 1949 and earned fame in his new home country as a designer of earthquake-proof building technologies.
At the age of over 100, Tarics still drove his car with the California licence plate “Gold36.” He swam, worked on solving mathematical problems and monitored sports news in Hungary, he said in a interview to MOB late last year.
He attended the 2012 London Olympics as the oldest living champion. When asked if he would also attend the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, he said: “We will see, it is hard to plan things so much forward.”
