THE DARKEST DAY Fifty years have now passed since the world was stunned by the terrorist attack at Munich 1972. Philip Barker looks back on the events which changed the Olympic Movement forever.
E
ven today, 50 years after it happened, the events of the 1972 Munich Olympics cast a long shadow over the city. Throughout this year there have been a series of commemorative occasions to remember those who came to compete in friendship but then never returned home. Those who only watched on television will still be able to recall the grim bulletins over two nightmarish days, when 11 Israeli team members were killed. A Munich police officer and five members of the Black September group, which had unleashed the deadly terrorist attack, also perished.
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Munich was the second occasion that the Summer Olympics had been staged in Germany. The Games were famously, or perhaps infamously, held in Berlin under the ominous shadow of Hitler and the Nazi swastika in 1936. Munich 1972 organising chief Willi Daume was determined to present a friendly and welcoming face and put on “cheerful” Games, which would as far as possible erase the bitter memories of Berlin. The International Olympic Committee selected Munich in 1966, ahead of rival bids from Montreal, Madrid and Detroit. A vast site on the outskirts of the city was transformed into an Olympic Park, and a large stadium and sports complex, complete with a tented roof, was designed by Frei Otto. The Athletes’ Village was built close by and was used for housing after the Games. As with many Olympics, the build-up to the action was mired in political controversy. Apartheid-era South Africa had been banned in 1970 but there were calls from many African nations to exclude the Rhodesians as well, because of their similar
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discriminatory policies. Even so, an agreement was brokered in the days leading up to Munich which allowed the Rhodesians to compete. The conditions stipulated that they were to compete as Southern Rhodesia, the name by which the country was known when it was a British colony, before its declaration of independence in 1965. The team duly arrived in the Olympic city and took part in the traditional welcome ceremony at the Village. The old flag of Southern Rhodesia was raised, and the British national anthem God Save the Queen was played. Team members wore green blazers with the single word “Rhodesia” below the crest, but the agreement for them to participate was deemed to have been infringed as they carried only Olympic identity cards and not British passports. This was a technicality, but it gave the Ethiopians, Kenyans and others the ammunition to call for Rhodesia’s expulsion. It did not help that a member of the
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