Germany organized the Olympic Games for the second time, after Berlin in 1936. Munich previously won the host in competition with Detroit, Madrid and Montreal.
In the desire to present West Germany to the international community as an open, modern and democratic state full of optimism (as opposed to Berlin in 1936, when Nazism was promoted), the organizers chose the motto "The Happy Games" as the slogan of the Games. For the first time, the Olympic Games received an official mascot - the cheerful dog Valdi.
A total of 7.134 athletes, from 121 countries, arrived in Bavaria and everything was ready to promote peace in a world divided by the Berlin Wall.
The opposite happened - it was the most tragic Games in the history of Olympism. The world was stunned when Palestinian terrorists, members of the "Black September" organization, invaded the Olympic village on September 5, 1972 and killed nine Israeli athletes and two coaches.
How did the tragedy happen? 11 days of the Games have already passed, in the best possible order, and no one could even guess what was in store. Not even the Israeli athletes, who watched the musical "Fiddler on the Roof" the night before the terrible event, in which their compatriot Shmuel Rodensky played the main role.
The Israelis arrived at the Olympic village after midnight and went to sleep carefree, so that they would be ready for tomorrow. Unfortunately, they met that day as hostages...
At 4.30:31 in the morning, a group of eight masked men, armed to the teeth, burst into the apartments at Konolištrase Street 12. After a big fight with the coach of the wrestling national team, Moša Weinberg, they captured 2 people. That number would certainly have been higher if Weinberg had not lied to them, telling them that there were no Israelis in apartment number XNUMX. Although the bullet went through his cheek, the former Israeli wrestling champion did not surrender, but after a short break, he attacked the terrorists and enabled one of his chosen ones, Gad Cobari, to escape through the underground garage. Weinberg was killed instantly, as was weightlifter Joseph Romano, who tried to help him.
The terrorists were left with nine prisoners... It turned out that the Jewish athletes were kidnapped by a group of Palestinians, who named themselves "Black September", in memory of September 16, 1970, when Jordan's King Hussein ordered the liquidation and persecution of thousands of Palestinians. .
A small cell of Fatah, which was under the control of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, demanded the release of 234 Palestinians from Israeli prisons, as well as the release of Andreas Bader and Ulrike Meinhoff, leaders of the radical left-wing "Red Army Faction" ( the so-called Bader-Meinhof group).
The Israelis immediately said that negotiations with the terrorists were out of the question and, according to some chroniclers, offered the Germans to send MOSAD (Institute for Espionage and Special Operations of Israel) to participate in the rescue operation.
German Chancellor Willy Brandt and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher rejected the offer and decided to resolve the situation themselves. That assessment turned out to be disastrous, as the German security forces had no experience in such situations.
After a whole day of negotiations, the members of "Black September" demanded that they be provided with transportation to Cairo. With two military helicopters, the hostages and terrorists were transferred to the nearby NATO airport, Firstenfeldbruck.
Unfortunately, the Germans made a fatal mistake - they thought the Israelis were kidnapped by four or five terrorists, but there were actually eight. It went from mistake to mistake, the Palestinians realized what was in store for them, and at 22.30:XNUMX p.m., firing began from all sides...
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The epilogue was terrible - wrestling referee Jozef Gutfreund (40 years old), weightlifters David Berger (28) and Zeev Fridman (28), wrestlers Elicer Halfin and Mark Slavin (24), athletics and shooting trainers Amicur were killed within a few hours. Shapira (40) and Keat Shor (53), fencing coach Andre Spicer (27) and weightlifting referee Jakov Springer.
Five Palestinians were killed in the operation to rescue the hostages, and of the three survivors, only Jamal Al-Gashej survived the MOSAD's revenge, who in 1999 was an actor (his face was blurred) in the documentary film "One Day in September" in Africa.
A 34-hour interruption of the Games followed, the International Olympic Committee discussed what to do next, but the competitions in Munich continued, with the support of Israeli officials, albeit without the country's athletes. A commemoration for the victims was held at the full Olympic Stadium.
Everything, of course, remained in the background after the terrible tragedy. And the fantastic result of Marko Spitz, the legendary American swimmer, who won seven gold medals in just eight days and became (and remains) the only athlete who succeeded in this in the history of sports.
Spitz first won the 28-meter butterfly on August 200, and the same evening he also won gold in the 4x100-meter freestyle relay. The next day, he won the 200-meter freestyle, while on August 31, he won the best medals in the 100-meter butterfly and 4x200 freestyle. Then he triumphed in the 100-meter freestyle, and on September 3, he concluded the golden streak in the 4x100 medley relay.
What's even more interesting, he broke world records in all those races! Spitz didn't even have time to properly celebrate his incredible success. Two days after he reached the seventh gold, the Munich Massacre took place.
Being a Jew, Spitz immediately fled Germany, overcome with pain. This is understandable, because immediately before the Games he stayed in Israel, where he was a guest in Weinberg's house, and in the Olympic village he socialized with all the victims.
SFR Yugoslavia won five medals at the Olympic Games in Munich - gold went to boxer Mata Parlov in the light heavyweight category and the men's handball team, silver went to Josip Čorak in Greco-Roman style wrestling, and his colleague Milovan Nenadić and Zvonimir Vujin won bronze.
In the final, Parlov defeated the Cuban Đilbert Karilj by knockout in the second round, while the handball players overcame Czechoslovakia (21:16) in the fight for the gold.
The Yugoslav basketball players were left without a medal in Munich, they finished the competition in fifth place thanks to a loss to Puerto Rico (79:74). In that match, Miguel Cole played for Puerto Rico and failed the doping test, but only he was punished, not the whole team. A scandal broke out, the Yugoslav basketball players decided to withdraw from the competition, but at the insistence of FIBA, they gave up. Only Ljubodrag-Duci Simonović persevered, who has never played for the Blues since then.
A big controversy also happened in the final of the basketball tournament. The United States of America, which won all seven previous Olympic tournaments, three seconds before the end with free throws by Doug Collins, reached a turnaround (50:49) against the Soviet Union. The Soviets went on the attack, but time was stopped for a second before the end, as the referees only then heard the siren that miraculously sounded between two Collins penalties.
USSR coach Vladimir Kondrashin took a time-out, but the half-court shot was inaccurate. The Americans began to celebrate, but the Soviets were magically granted a third chance, as the British-Italian Renato William Jones, the general secretary of FIBA, saw that the clock had been turned back to 50 seconds.
Although according to the rules Jones had no right to interfere, the judges and the delegate were not allowed to oppose him. The ball was thrown across the entire field, and Aleksandar Bjelov put it into the basket with the sound of the siren for 51:50.
US officials protested, but the FIBA commission in Cold War times voted by affiliation - members from Italy and Puerto Rico voted for the Americans, but were overpowered by representatives from countries that were Soviet allies - Hungary, Poland and Cuba.
The gold went to the USSR, and the Americans refused to accept the silver medals, which are still on display in the museum in Lausanne. Moreover, Captain Kenny Davis wrote in his will that his wife and children should never receive his silver medal.
USSR athletes dominated in Berlin, as they won as many as 50 gold medals, 27 silver and 22 bronze. The Americans were second (33 - 31 - 30), East Germany third (20 - 23 - 23), and the host, West Germany, only fourth (13 - 11 - 16).
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