JERZY PAWLOWSKI was one of the most fascinating sportsmen of the Cold War era; his story was a compulsive mix of achievement, ambition, arrogance and intrigue.

Born in Warsaw in 1932, he grew up and studied law in a city devastated by war. He had taken up fencing at the age of 16 and improved throughout his career in the Polish Army, becoming particularly proficient with the sabre. He had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel by the time he fell spectacularly from grace in 1975.

His competitive career truly began in 1953 when he finished runner-up in the world under-21 championships, while his team took bronze for Poland at the senior world championships. He won silver at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 and took the world title the next year. Once dominated by the French and Italians, the Eastern Bloc countries — Hungary, the Soviet Union, Poland and Romania — were gradually coming to dominate the sport. Hungarian fencers frustrated Pawlowski’s medal ambitions before the 1960 Olympics in Rome, where an astonishing Soviet team swept all before them. But Pawlowski took the world title again in 1965 and 1966, finally taking Olympic gold for Poland in the individual sabre in 1968.

The communist takeover of this most aristocratic of sports placed a new emphasis on speed and mobility rather than poise or grace. Other challengers, such as America’s Albert Axelrod — dubbed “the tractor” by his Russian competitors for his refusal to take a step backwards — were developing an uncompromisingly muscular approach. Yet Pawlowski, with his nimble, 5ft 9in frame, maintained the sport’s traditional grace while adding extraordinary speed. By the time he won his second world sabre title in 1965, he was giving demonstrations with a sabre in each hand. He swung the blades with such speed that even veterans of the art could not follow his actions.

Pawlowski was lauded as his country’s greatest sportsman and representative. The Polish party chief Edward Gierek is said to have taken him along to a meeting with his Soviet opposite, Leonid Brezhnev. Pawlowski’s rank in the army, the sensitivity of his role as a secret service agent and his importance to the state as a sportsman, afforded him luxuries only dreamt of by most of his countrymen. In 1973 he published his novel, Trud olimpijskiego zlota (The Burden of Olympic Gold) and reached his last world final. He was eliminated in the early rounds a year later. He would probably have pressed on — many fencers maintain good form well into middle age — but for the intervention of politics.

Much remains unclear, although Pawlowski’s cupidity was certainly at odds with the ideals of Marxist- Leninism, and had made him unpopular in party circles. He was flamboyant, contemptuous of the Russians and loved gambling. His colleagues later suspected that it was his love of risk-taking, even more than his hunger for money, that led him into trouble.

Pawlowski was arrested in August 1975 and charged with activities on behalf of a foreign country. Brief arrest notices were published in two Polish newspapers, but the specific crime, and the country he was thought to have been working for, remained unclear throughout his two and a half months in detention awaiting trial. The New York Times printed the rumour that he had been working for the French.

He faced the death penalty, but was given 25 years’ imprisonment, 10 years’ suspension of civil rights and forfeiture of his entire property. The charges claimed that he had been in the pay of the CIA for 11 years. He served ten years in jail, then was exchanged, along with two dozen other Western spies, for four agents from the Eastern Bloc, on Glienicke Bridge between East and West Berlin. Pawlowski refused to cross, stating that he was a Polish patriot. It was arranged for him to be allowed his liberty in Poland.

In the early 1980s, the sports writer David Wallechinsky wrote in The Complete Book of the Olympics that Pawlowski had in fact been asked by the Polish Government to spy on his country’s behalf, and was accused of spying for the enemy in retribution for his refusal. He protested his innocence until, reacting to his rousing speeches, the Polish Governnment released his case file. It stated that Pawlowski had become an enemy agent only after informing for the state; reporting on his own team-mates until 1962 when his superiors, troubled by his greed, dispensed with his services. True or not, these revelations scuppered Pawlowski’s power to play the anti-Soviet folk hero. From every political standpoint Pawlowski now appeared to be a traitor.

Pawlowski vented his anger in a new book, Najdluzszy Pojedynek (My Longest Duel), which assured the Polish people that he had been motivated only by a desire to see them free from tyranny. He continued to teach fencing, and worked sometimes as a freelance faith healer. He was married three times. He had no children.

Jerzy Pawlowski, fencer and secret service agent, was born on October 25, 1932. He died on January 11, 2005, aged 72.