‘Where other people have their hearts, Avery Brundage has a discus,’ one of his sporting friends once said about the President of the Olympic Committee (IOC). Indeed, seemingly unmoved, Brundage allowed the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich to go ahead after Palestinian terrorists had kidnapped and ultimately murdered the Israeli athletes David Berger, Zeev Friedman, Josef Gutfreund, Eliezer Halfin, Josef Romano, Amitzur Shapira, Kehat Shorr, Mark Slavin, André Spitzer, Yakov Springer, and Mosche Weinberg.
Eager to shield the Games from the intrusive tentacles of the real world, the ancient IOC emperor state after a one-day moment of silence that the Games were apolitical – and so it was time to move on. But Brundage himself was highly political. As a highly decorated sports official and representative of the USA, the antisemite, Hitler admirer, and Nazi sympathiser infamously had two Jewish sprinters removed from the 4 x 100 metre relay team at the 1936 Games in Germany because they would have embarrassed Hitler even more if they had won.
The problem with the Olympic Games lies in their very invention: they were born out of a lost war. Shaken by France’s defeat against Germany in 1870/71, the Games’ founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a pedagogue and historian, looked for a way to re-energise his supposedly effete countrymen. He found a solution in physical education. On the one hand, he dreamed of sporting combat instead of war. But he also dreamed of a white, male brotherhood of the strong, of warlike athletes who, if necessary, would defend the fatherland with their muscular power.
The Olympic Committee only began reassessing its own history in 2006. Of course, nobody has noticed. The 1972 tragedy was also accompanied by a mixture of mishaps, ignorance, and incompetence on the part of German politicians: after all, shortly after the murders, the Bavarian judiciary had released and flown out the three surviving arrested perpetrators for fear of a further attack. It took Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to put things right. She ordered Mossad to find and kill 13 planners, suspects, and attack participants, who were spread all over the world. The mission later became known as ‘Operation Wrath of God’.
Until the very end, it was not clear whether Israel’s President Yitzchak Herzog and bereaved family members would even attend the 50th anniversary memorial service. Federal President Frank Walter Steinmeier finally apologised to Herzog shortly beforehand, saying that the whole process of coming to terms with the events had been ‘shameful’. It was only after decades of dispute, shortly before the anniversary, that the German government reached an agreement with the surviving relatives on compensation – in order to avoid a scandal.
