The Hungarian Dynasty: Europe's Forgotten 25-Year Reign

First, a question

If you ask which association has been the most successful in World Championships history, the answer is China beyond doubt.

But which is second?

Most people’s instinct is Japan — it ruled the sport in the 1950s and invented the loop in the 1960s. The real answer is Hungary.

Between 1926 and 1951 the country turned the World Championships into something close to its own tournament; its total haul of world titles runs into the dozens (counting doubles won alongside foreign partners), keeping it second on the all-time list, well clear of Japan. In Chinese-language coverage, this period is almost a blank.

Dominant from the start: eight men’s team titles in the first nine editions

The first World Championships, held in London in 1926, featured only five events — and Hungary won all of them.

Here is how the early years went:

Eight men’s team titles in nine editions. The only miss was Prague 1932, where Czechoslovakia took advantage of home conditions.

The same period is even more lopsided by event:

• Men’s singles: eight titles in nine editions.
• Women’s singles: seven in a row.
• Mixed doubles: Hungary won all nine.

And when the 5th World Championships returned to Budapest in 1931, Hungary won men’s team, men’s singles, women’s singles, men’s doubles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles. Since a women’s team event did not yet exist, that amounted to a clean sweep of everything on offer.

Barna: 22 world titles, unbeaten for nearly a century

If the dynasty had a face, it was Viktor Barna.

His total of 22 world titles breaks down as:

• 5 men’s singles
• 8 men’s doubles
• 2 mixed doubles
• 7 men’s team

To put that in context, here is the all-time leaderboard:

Barna remains the most decorated player in World Championships history, a record that has stood for nearly seventy years. Given that the Second World War interrupted the championships for seven years (1940–1946), his tally might well have been higher still.

Mednyánszky: 18 titles, the greatest woman of them all

Over the same years, the women’s game belonged to Mária Mednyánszky.

She did two things that remain rare:

1. She won at least one gold at every World Championships from the first edition through the ninth.
2. She took women’s singles five times in a row (the 1st through the 5th), the first player ever to do so.

She won 18 world titles in total, including seven women’s doubles and six mixed doubles — the most of any woman in the history of the championships.

One intriguing thought: had the women’s team event arrived earlier (it was added only at the 8th edition in 1934), her total might well have passed Barna’s.

An overlooked name: Szabados

A dynasty is never one person.

Barna’s teammate Miklós Szabados won 15 world titles, second on the all-time list — one more than Ma Long. He was also one of the men who brought the pimpled rubber bat to China: in the mid-1930s, as reigning world champion, he toured the world with exhibition matches, and the rubber bat reached China with him.

Table tennis entered China precisely through the touring performances of this generation of European champions.

How the dynasty ended

War broke out in 1939. The World Championships were suspended from 1940 to 1946 — seven full years.

In 1947 the championships resumed in Paris. But Barna was no longer at his peak (he later switched to represent England), and Hungary’s men’s team lost its grip.

The dynasty’s last glow came through the women: Farkas won three straight women’s singles titles from 1947 to 1949. On the men’s side, the Hungarian great Ferenc Sidó led the team back to the men’s team title at the 16th edition in 1949 and took men’s singles at the 20th in 1953 — Hungary’s last men’s singles world title.

Beyond that, at the 1952 World Championships in Bombay, Japan arrived with sponge bats and shook the hall on its first appearance, ending Europe’s outright hold on the sport.

The country did not simply vanish, though. At the 35th World Championships in Pyongyang in 1979, Hungary’s men won the Swaythling Cup once more — the veteran power’s final flash on the champions’ list.

The match against China: Dortmund 1959

The Hungarian story has a singular ending — and it happens to fall at the very moment China first stood on top of the world.

The 25th World Championships were held in Dortmund, Germany, in 1959. Japan won six of the seven titles. The one that slipped away, men’s singles, went to China’s Rong Guotuan — the first world champion in the history of sport in the People’s Republic of China.

And Rong’s opponent in that final was Hungary’s Sidó.

More subtly still: Sidó was also Rong’s men’s doubles partner at that tournament.

The oldest table tennis power in Europe witnessed China’s arrival in exactly this way. The handover of the sport took place at the two ends of the same table.

Further reading

• From Dinner-Table Game to World Sport: Table Tennis’s First Forty Years: where the dynasty’s history and its rules began
• The Japanese Era: Sponge and the Loop: who finally ended Europe’s dominance
• Rong Guotuan: New China’s First World Champion: the winner at the far end of the dynasty
• Twelve Smashes: That Night in 1961: the edition where China lifted the Swaythling Cup

In one line: half a century before table tennis was called China’s “national game,” it belonged to Hungary — Barna’s 22 world titles still lead the all-time list, and the dynasty ended on the very table where China first became champion.