THE LONG ECLIPSE OF AMERICAN ROWING generation.4949 After failing to medal in the double at the 1960 Olympics with his long- time friend and teammate, Bill Knecht, Kel retired from rowing himself and redirected his energies to leading his club to the 1964 Eights Gold Medal. After what he saw in Rome, Kelly had lost faith that Vesper coach Jim Manning could deliver the goods in this new era of change in rowing, and so he quickly replaced him with an expatriate Hungarian named Tibor Machán,4950 who was working as a swimming coach in Ohio when he got Kelly’s call. Tibor Machán The Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin (1963): “Tibor MacHan4951 was born in Budapest 54 years ago, the son of a Scottish father and a Hungarian mother. The elder MacHan, a steeplechase pioneer in Hungary, was killed half a century ago when a horse threw him. “Young Tibor started his aquatic career as a swimmer, winning the high school 100- meter freestyle championship in Budapest and playing on a top-ranking water polo team for three years. One day, after water polo practice in the icy Danube, laryngitis laid him low. “‘A friend said to me, ‘Tibor, why be a fool? Why be in the water when you can be on it? And I agreed,’ he recalls, ‘and I switched to rowing.’ 4949 See Chapters 55, 56 and 87. 4950 The rowing coach was Tibor G. Machán, as opposed to Tibor R. Machán, his severely estranged son from his first marriage, an American college professor who has written a memoir, The Man Without a Hobby, which describes Machán père as angry, abusive and anti-Semitic. 4951 According to his son, Tibor père attempted to anglicize his name by changing the spelling after he got to Philadelphia. “In his first rowing year, MacHan won seven junior races, later added eight Hungarian national championships, from pairs to eights. “‘I was coaching the Budapest rowing team half the time,’ he said. ‘The other half, I was a radio announcer. During the war, I broadcast news from the capital – and when the Russians entered the city, they said I was a war criminal.’ “Tibor and his wife, Anna, like many of their compatriots, escaped to Austria. “‘We approached the border at high noon. We carried nothing but a knapsack. The border guards were sleeping or eating, I don’t know. We went through – and they saw us and started shooting at us, but we were already on the Austrian side. The Austrian guards captured us but let us go.’ “The next few years were a crazy quilt of jobs for the MacHans. “After eleven months as a janitor in an Austrian school, MacHan’s rowing friends in Denmark got him a coaching post with a club in Copenhagen. One of the club members was King Frederik (‘a charming gentleman and a fine oarsman’) who permitted the couple to stay in Denmark (they were stateless, without passports) by royal decree. “They’d been in Denmark five years when one of his former radio colleagues urged them to work for Radio Free Europe in Munich. Both Tibor and his blond wife, a noted actress on the Hungarian stage, went to Germany and used their talents on the anti-Communist station. “‘Finally, we had enough money saved to pay a smuggler $1,000 to get our son, whom we’d left behind with his grandmother, out of Hungary. Finally we were a whole family again.’ “There was also enough money left for the trip to the United States. “They arrived in America in 1956. Once again, MacHan found himself in, rather than on, the water as a swimming 1381