Four-time Olympian Won Silver While a Rutgers Student in 1964  

Paul Pesthy, a 1967 Rutgers graduate, fled Europe during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Sixty years ago, he won a silver medal in the modern pentathlon in the Tokyo Olympics.

David Devore remembers vividly watching his Rutgers fencing teammate Paul Pesthy recover from a seemingly unsurmountable margin to win a bout.

“It was extraordinary,” says Devore, RC’68, GSNB’73, who earned a Rutgers undergraduate degree in biological sciences and a master’s and doctorate in chemistry. “He pulled off a toe touch. He did some other things that are extremely hard to do. He was just an unbelievably fit athlete, which is why he won a silver medal.”

Pesthy, who died in 2008 at the age of 70, competed in the epee, the heaviest of the three weapons used in fencing, and also the modern pentathlon, which combines fencing, equestrian, shooting, swimming, and cross country. He was a key part of the U.S. team that won a silver medal in the modern pentathlon in Tokyo in 1964. 

“He was the best athlete I ever knew,” says Devore, the founder and lead consultant for GRAPLON Technologies who served as an associate research professor at Rutgers from 2003–2010 and remains a visiting scientist in biomedical engineering. “Paul was in a class by himself.”

In 1995, Pesthy, a two-time national champion in the epee while at Rutgers, was inducted into the Rutgers Athletics Hall of Fame. He competed in the Olympics in 1968 in Mexico City and 1976 in Montreal. At the age of 42, he qualified for the 1980 fencing team but did get to not compete in Moscow because of the United States boycott of the games in protest of the former Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

It was not the first time the Soviet Union impacted Pesthy. He and his father, Charles, himself an exceptional athlete who once had been ranked number one in the world in the sabre division of fencing, escaped their native Hungary in 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution that was quashed by the Soviet Union. 

They fled first to Colombia, but then immigrated to America, where Paul Pesthy—after being spotted by a U.S. Army general in a competition—served in the Army and attended Rutgers. 

His father was named coach of Rutgers fencing and tennis teams in 1962, and was beloved by Devore and fencing teammate Russell Oberlander RC’1967. “He was a good guy,” Oberlander says.

Devore says Charles Pesthy was “just a wonderful, wonderful warm man” who was part of the Hungarian community in New Brunswick. He invited the fencing team to their home for Hungarian food. 

“He treated us like we were family,” Devore says.

Devore says although Paul Pesthy was a fierce competitor, outside of competition he was a kind teammate.

“He was fun loving,” Devore says. “We would travel on a typical bus to wherever we were fencing, and he'd just have a whole crowd of guys around him and they'd be telling jokes.”

After his time at Rutgers, Pesthy settled near San Antonio, Texas, where he taught kinesiology for more than two decades at San Antonio College and coached many young athletes. He “almost single-handedly” built a home for his family there, his 2008 obituary in the San Antonio Express-News says.

A page on Olympics.com details Pesthy's results in the Olympics, and an Illinois state senator whose two sons trained under Pesthy championed a resolution honoring him that shares more details about his life. 

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