No finer story exists than the one about the Hungarian Karoly Takacs, recounted by David Wallechinsky in his Olympic compendium, The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics. A world-class shooter in the mid-1930s, Takacs injured his right hand in a grenade accident. So he switched to his left hand, practised, and won gold at the 1948 London Olympics. He was thirty-eight. In 1952, at forty-two, he won a second gold.
