Mark Spitz: “50 years ago I was involved in horror”

This Monday, September 5, marks half a century of one of the black pages of sport. It is classified under the label ‘sport’ because it happened during the 1972 Munich Olympics, but the truth is that it had nothing to do with the values ​​that sport represents. That infamous day, the Palestinian terrorist commando ‘Black September’ assassinated eleven members of the Israeli Olympic delegation – five athletes and six coaches – as well as a German policeman.

Armed with Kalaschnikov rifles and grenades, the terrorists attacked the headquarters of the Israeli Olympic delegation in the Olympic Village at dawn, at 04:35 am, sowing panic and terror. At that moment, Mark Spitz, one of the great swimmers in history and who the day before had won his seventh gold and world record at the Olympiad, was returning to headquarters after having dinner with some journalists.

Spitz poses 50 years later with his seven gold medals in Munich 1972. /

LAUREUS

Spitz was still unaware of the news when he walked into what he thought would be a news conference about his accomplishments the next morning. As the seven-time champion was Jewish, he feared he might be a target and was soon secretly taken to safety with an armed escort. He himself remembers it: «After the press conference I was sitting in the Olympic Village, in my room, watching television and there was a constant comment: ‘We believe that Mark Spitz, who finished his program in swimming, has been evacuated and It’s in Italy. About 20 minutes later: ‘No, that information was wrong, he is somewhere in Sweden.’ I don’t know if they said it to mislead people, because I was still in my room in the Olympic Village », he declares in a talk with Laureus, a foundation of which he is a member.

Crouched in a car and covered with a blanket

It took a few hours to have a definitive plan, which was none other than to take as little as possible to move the California ‘shark’ to a safe place. “They put me and my coach in the back seat of a car and told me to get down and they put a blanket on me,” says the champion. After about five minutes they told me to sit down, and they took us to the airport and then we boarded a plane for London. Everything happened so fast and upon arriving in the British capital, Spitz was not aware of the magnitude of the attack, when the trap set for the terrorists at the Fürstenfeldbrück military airfield ended in a massacre. “We didn’t know what was happening in Germany. When we woke up in the morning, the escort told us what had happened: late in the afternoon, everything had happened at the military base, where the other athletes were killed.

To this day, Spitz continues without giving credit to what he experienced in the first person. “50 years ago, less than 24 hours after winning my seventh Olympic gold, I was caught up in the confusion and horror of the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes.” The link between Spitz’s Olympic history and that of the Israeli team has survived for half a century. “Thirteen years later I had the opportunity to meet a couple of the wives of the athletes killed when I was in Israel and two of their children, and there were reasons for the link with me: one, that I was Jewish; and second, that I was in the same Olympics with his parents. It was a terrible tragedy, not only for those athletes but for the Olympic movement and for the families in particular. We are still talking about it today », he recalls.