From the Archives: James Thurber on the Hungry Hungarian Olympians
I thought I'd see what The New Yorker had in its archives from past Olympic Games and found this funny piece in the July 23, 1932 issue written by James Thurber, humorist and cartoonist. Enjoy! (BTW: does anyone know what Pragerschinken is?)
"The Hungarian swimming and pentathlon teams arrived here with one interesting piece of luggage: an immense waterproof box. A visitor in their hotel rooms noticed it and asked about it. Proudly one of the foreign athletes opened it and revealed that it was well stocked with every kind of edible from salami to Pragerschinken. The Hungarians explained that they were nobody's fools; they had found out that to get to the Olympic Games they had to cross six or seven thousand miles of American prairie, or desert, and they didn't intend to be caught wihtout food in the ominous wilderness. As far as we know, they got to Los Angeles without losing a man to starvation."