While a major in the Polish Army, Pawłowski won the gold medal in the individual saber event at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the first non-Hungarian in 48 years to win an Olympic sabre gold medal. He took part in a total of six Olympic Games from 1952 to 1972, garnering additionally three silver medals and a bronze at the 1956, 1960 and 1964 Summer Olympics.

In 1967 the International Fencing Federation declared him the best fencer of all time.

He was arrested on 24 April 1975, and on 8 April 1976, was sentenced by a military court in Warsaw to 25 years of prison, 10 years suspension of civic rights, demotion to private, forfeiture of all his property for having committed espionage since 1964 on behalf of an unnamed NATO country, and his name was erased from Polish sporting records. He had in fact been a double agent for the U.S. CIA from 1964, and for Polish intelligence from 1950.

Ten years later, he was to have been included in one of the spy exchanges at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge but chose to remain in Poland and spent the rest of his life as a painter and faith healer in Warsaw, where he died.

Pawlowski was born in Warsaw in a family of a car mechanic and studied law at university there. He had a brother named Henryk Pawlowski. Jerzy joined the army, eventually rising to the rank of major. He took to fencing comparatively late, as a 16-year-old, concentrating on sabre. By 1953 he was runner-up in the world under-21 championships and was part of the team that took bronze at the senior world championships, Poland's first such success since 1934. At the next championships, he came fourth in the individual event behind three Hungarians, who had long exerted a stranglehold on sabre fencing.

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