Ten months after his announcing his official retirement from professional swimming, 2012 Olympic champion Daniel Gyurta has been named a senior advisor to the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Trade and Foreign Affairs, Nemzeti Sport reported Tuesday.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Péter Szijjártó talked about the growing role of sports in international affairs during Gyurta’s signing ceremony and named-dropped Katinka Hosszu as an example of a Hungarian athlete who is expanding the nation’s international reach. He added that Hungary hosted 225 major sports competitions over the past two years, with four world championships in Olympic sports slated for 2019.
Gyurta, 29, became a staple of international swimming at the young age of 15 when he won the 2004 Olympic silver medal behind Japan’s Kosuke Kitajima in the 200m breaststroke. He finished fifth in 2008, and then in 2012, Gyurta won 200 breast gold he also made the 2016 Games but failed to advance to semi-finals. He won the 2009, 2011, and 2013 FINA World Championships in the same event, taking third in 2015.
In all, his run in the 200 breaststroke is one of the most dominant single-event runs in modern competitive swimming. From 2009 through 2014, he won every European, World, and Olympic title in the event, in long course and short course, aside from a silver at the 2010 Short Course World Championships.
In 2016, Gyurta was voted onto the International Olympic Committee’s Athlete’s Commission and additionally served on the Sport and Active Society Commission from 2016-2018.
Gyurta was great at one time and one time only. It has been downhill ever since his 2012 London Olympic gold. He sold out to Orban’s communist, very corrupt government. Was it worth it?
how sad, he really doesn’t need to serve the most corrupt and disruptive dictatorship West of Putin. But one can always argue that helping this government steer in the right direction is more crucial than ever.
Is this about Archduke Ferdinand? Will we all die?
*He got third in 2015, not ’17.
As a hungarian its interesting that I hear about this here sooner than on hungarian media