Murder in Munich, 1972: How the ‘cheerful’ Olympics went sour

Fifty years ago, the summer Olympics were held in Munich. The event will always be remembered for the massacre of 11 Israelis by the Palestinian group Black September. Former athletics correspondent Pat Butcher was there at the time

Demonstrators demand an end to the Games while hostages are being held (Getty)

It was ridiculously easy to get into the Munich Olympic athletes’ village in 1972, even after the murderous incursion by Black September guerrillas which resulted in the deaths of 11 Israelis, a German policeman, and five of the terrorists. No one, it seems, least of all the Bavarian police or any of the West German authorities, had prepared for anything like the attack. The emphasis was on emulating Tokyo 1964, and seeing Munich as the ultimate exercise in rehabilitation for the leading member of the Axis powers a quarter of a century after the Second World War. And in Olympic terms, the Germans needed to exorcise the memory of the 1936 Games in Berlin which, despite African-American Jesse Owens’ best efforts (a four gold-medal affront to Hitler’s dreams of Aryan supremacy), remained a display dedicated to greater Nazi glory.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) might also have expected that bringing the Games back to Europe from a volatile Latin America would have a stabilising effect on the institution. But it wasn’t just the events of Mexico 1968, both in and out of the stadium, that should have alerted the IOC and the German authorities to the possibility of unrest. Bob Beamon’s stratospheric long jump and the black-power salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 200 metres medal ceremony are probably the best-remembered events in the stadium; but the 1968 Games were marred before they even began, by assassinations which still resonate in Mexican society and politics more than 50 years later. Student unrest was worldwide in 1968, but in Mexico it became focused on the soaring costs of the Games in a country where privation was widespread, with assassinations of student and labour leaders by right-wing groups or the military itself.