When asked by our paper, Károly Juhász gladly recalled the three-hour TV show hosted by István Vágó, which he won with a very high intelligence level of 148. The police team also achieved a good result, just a hair behind the teachers in first place. The Minister of the Interior at the time, Mónika Lamperth, praised and rewarded her, while the national police chief, László Salgó, thanked her for her excellent performance in a personal letter.
– The televised IQ competition was an extraordinary experience for me for several reasons. The first reason, this was my first television appearance, when I could see up close and from the inside how the production and recording of programs works. The other reason was obviously that I managed to get the first place. Of course, it was a very good feeling that I won the competition, and if I remember correctly, I was the best not only among the participants in the program, but also among the hundreds of thousands of viewers who took the test at home – the lieutenant colonel recalled his memories of 2003.
He also said that for a few months after the IQ test, he was sought out by the media several times, appeared in newspapers and on TV – there was even a newspaper where he was on the front page – but his life did not change. His life path didn’t change either, although it occurred to him that he was looking for another job, since he also has a degree in economics. He looked around at a few financial institutions, but everywhere he would have been a rookie with a starting salary that was less than his police salary at the time.
“I’m not unhappy with my fate, but it could have been much more fortunate.” For sure, I feel that I have to work hard for the result. After the intelligence competition, everyone set the bar extremely high for me – the first IQ champion continued his thoughts, and then expressed his honest opinion about today’s television competitions -: I was so disappointed with the competition that even though it took an extremely serious performance to win, the reward was extremely low. If you look at the contests on television today, you can see that even with very little added value, very serious prizes of millions can be achieved. And most importantly, they design these quizzes in such a way that luck is more important than knowledge. For this reason, I am not even thinking about entering a TV competition again.
At the end of the conversation, we were also curious as to how Lt. Col. Juhász sees it, to what extent he has influenced people’s perception of the police
in his image, his and his colleagues’ successful participation in the 2003 televised IQ competition:
– According to my memories, people’s opinion of the police was very positive after the show. Many of my acquaintances congratulated me, but there was also a case where an unknown man came up to me in the Videoton stadium to congratulate me, and then very enthusiastically called his family to come and see, here is the winner of the IQ competition on TV. I think that all this has been forgotten since then, and recent events have taken over the police’s judgment. There are no fewer police jokes than there were, my friends always share one with me, but I don’t take it to heart.
