Grigoris Lambrakis (1912-1963) was a Greek politician, doctor, and an athlete. He had 17 siblings and grew up in a poor agricultural family but his father encouraged him to pursue his studies, regretting (as Grigoris later narrated) that he had put his children “in the mud.” Lambrakis was a star athlete who won the long jump contest of the Balkan championships ten times and held the Greek record for long jump for 23 years. During the Axis occupation (1941-1944) he set up the Union of Greek Athletes that used the profits from the competitions to help the Greek people. He was elected to the Hellenic Parliament in the 1961 Greek election but was soon assassinated by far-right extremists.