“An attack on the site of Olympic happiness” – L’Express

“I remember by Klaus Wolfermann. This name probably doesn’t mean anything to you. It ran through my child’s head, it ran through my adult’s head. He never ran away, always reappeared, never faded away. The brain works strangely, I will learn this later at the university of natural sciences, for the little time I attend it: the temporal lobe filters consciousness, selects one event of existence, ignores another, and decides in dizziness what will remain of a life. Mine, of brain, persists, fifty years after the end of the summer of 1972, in not forgetting the man who won the javelin throwing competition at the Munich Olympic Games: Klaus Wolfermann. On September 3, 1972, he won the title on his fifth try with a throw of 90.48 meters, beating his Soviet rival Janis Lusis by two centimeters. Soviet but Latvian, in parentheses: Lusis doesn’t sound very Russian. The accounting of medals was bogus, like the supposed domination of the empire: we have since regained a sense of proportion, in terms of rankings and doping and with the explosion of the “USSR“ in 1991, everyone understood everything else – except Vladimir Putin.

Klaus Wolfermann, I said. I remember his screams, his goat jumps, his goatee, this plump body so far removed from the aesthetic codes of stadium Apollons, even if seeing the images of his victorious throw instantly gives you a sore shoulder. With his corporate executive appearance, he looked like an Adidas salesman roaming the medium-sized West German cities. He wore the RFA tank top, badge on the chest, black eagle on a yellow background, a jersey that the French feared, although less than that of the DDR, the “East Germans”, a people of formidable athletes trained in won. Gary Lineker’s famous comment on the pragmatic nature of West German football then applied to East Germany, and not just for football. In the end, they always won. But the nation that gave birth to Kornelia Ender cannot be all bad – Vincent Duluc has said everything about the missing beauty. […]

Munich was the return of the Games to the European continent. They told us that. I was a child. After Rome 1960, the events stopped in Asia (Tokyo 1964) and Central America (Mexico 1968). […]

“Everything was ready. Me too”

“Germany”, that of the West, quickly rebuilt because it had been on the right side of History with the Cold War, regained the right to expose its insolent success. We forgot that Munich was the birthplace of Nazism and that the stadium, imperial and modern, was built near the Dachau camp. Milos Forman, who will put his cameras on these Games in a memorable collective film, Vision of Eightwill die without realizing his final project, adapted from the book by Georges‐Marc Benamou, The Ghost of Munich. When he arrived in town and visited the place where, in 1938, some European democracies dropped their pants in front of Hitler, he declared: “I get goosebumps knowing that it was in this room that the comes from my parents.” […]

In 1972, German efficiency, which rarely disappoints, worked wonders. The facilities were the best in the world, blondes Gretchen provided Wilkommen in global advertising spots, the graphic charter amazed with its inventiveness. 7,134 athletes, including 1,059 women (14%, hum, Tokyo 2020 achieved 48%, Paris 2024 is aiming for 50%), took part in 195 competitions, 121 nations lined up in 21 sports. Everything was ready. Me too. […]

But we are not going to beat around the bush: the Summer Games of 1972 were first and foremost the organized massacre of which they were the scene. The desecration of the dream, the blood splashing the flags of the Nations, an attack committed on the site of Olympic happiness: the athletes’ village. Writing about Munich cannot be done without recalling this moment in history where a management fearful of seeing the festivities hampered by an external event prevented, once triggered, the abomination from being resolved as best as possible, then being offered the posterity that the questions asked demanded.

Germany was proud of its village. She praised the freedom, carefreeness and other new ideas that were not just media-marketing catch-alls. Proud also of the image of a benevolent country which turned its back on its dark past by letting hundreds of young people manage themselves. Result: too light security made it possible for armed men, disguised as residents, to violently attack athletes and coaches caught sleeping.

“In Munich, everyone lost everything”

On the night of September 4 to 5, 1972, at 4:25 a.m., two days after the victory of Klaus Wolfermann, who could still express his joy (because how can you be happy afterwards?), a Palestinian commando from the Black September group appeared in the Israeli team’s apartment located in building 31 and took 11 athletes hostage. Under penalty of executing them, and he starts by killing two to frighten the others, he demands the release of 200 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. Broadcast on television, including for the attackers who know minute by minute what is being planned against them, the botched and failed rescue operations result in carnage: 11 Israeli athletes murdered, and in cruel conditions, a German police officer killed along with five Palestinians. Three others were captured but released a few months later, leading to suspicions that Germany was reluctant to see a trial take place in which it would have been implicated.

Next, it was IOC President Avery Brundage who declared without the slightest doubt: “The Games must continue”, his way of interpreting the Olympic truce, his way above all of showing the terrorists how much the cause of sport was stronger than theirs – which is not true. There will be a twenty‐four hour break at the time of the assault, but apart from the fact that it was above all the families of the victims who were upset by such political lightness, the The show must go on is debatable, all the same – today, the Games would stop, wouldn’t they? When it comes to obscenity, we are never safe from anything […]

In Munich, everyone lost everything: the Olympic mass, which will never be the same again; the Palestinian cause, too assimilated to this violence for us to understand what it is going through in the occupied territories and to be offended that the Oslo Accords have been trampled underfoot; Israeli athletes and their loved ones, who suffered the effects of a scandalous denial. And an outrage that went unsaid: it was only in September 2022 that the German state presented its official apology to the families for the way things happened. They could have arrived earlier, been formulated straight away, if only to thwart the tragic evidence: in 1972, Jews were killed in Germany, and because they were Jews. […]”.

Extract of I remember… Pérec’s stride (and other sporting madeleines), directed by Benoît Heimermann. Threshold, 226 p., €19.90.

Taken from I remember… Pérec’s stride (and other sporting madeleines), directed by Benoît Heimermann. Threshold, 226 p., €19.90.