Finnish bench athletes love Munich, which hosts the EC athletics championships – on the other hand, Germans tour it from afar after the competitions

The European Championship week in Munich can be seen on channels from August 11 to 21. You can find live broadcasts, highlights, the competition schedule, interesting news and topics on ‘s competition page.

The 1972 Olympics. Lasse Virén win a double on long track distances, Pekka Vasala gold in the 1,500 meters and Tapio Kantanen hurdle bronze.

The 2002 European Championships. Janne Holmén excite the marathon with the European championship, Heli Koivula leaping silver and Mikaela Ingberg throw a bronze javelin.

The English term bucket list refers to things that a person wants to do before they die. For the Finnish athletics niilo, a visit to the Olympic Stadium in Munich can be counted as such, thanks to the reasons mentioned above.

The place literally exudes blue-and-white nostalgia. After the world wars, Finnish track and field athletes have won more gold medals, five, only from the games organized in Rome. In Helsinki, the Finns have won four gold medals, just like in Munich, but Helsinki has also organized six games – that is, three times the number compared to Munich.

When there has been competition in Munich, at least one Finn has won gold. The same applies to the host country Germany, which is the perennial success of European athletics. When talking about a nation of more than 80 million people, the expected value is naturally higher than in Finland, which has a brisk population of 5 million. Out of the 88 victories of Finnish track and field athletes, 43 are from the period before the Second World War.

Germany has become accustomed to success even later, both in the era of divided and united Germany. However, the 2002 European Championships in Munich are an exception. Of those, Germany got 19 medals, but only two of them were gold. Measured in terms of gold medals, the performance is the weakest in the country’s EC history.

For comparison: in the 1998 European Championships in Budapest, before Munich, the Germans grabbed a total of eight gold medals. For the German consumer of the traditional sport, EC-München was not left with a golden memory trace.

Now the German team is going to their home games with the historically weak World Cup in Oregon behind them. The team’s balance was only Malaika Mihambon long gold and women’s IM bronze.

Mihambo has been out of action since the World Cup due to the corona virus, so even the first team’s fitness is a mystery. So, will we see Germany’s historic EC squat this week?

For German athletics, Munich specifically represents Olympic nostalgia with a capital N. 50 years ago in Munich, East Germany won eight golds and was second in the medal table. With six golds, West Saxony is the fourth best country in athletics.

And perhaps most importantly: of the two Summer Olympics organized by Germany, Munich 1972 has a significantly more positive aftertaste than Berlin 1936.

That, in a nutshell, is the essence of how athletics and Munich are connected. Although Munich is Germany’s third largest city with 1.4 million inhabitants, and the population in the metropolitan area exceeds the six million mark, it is at a low level in terms of athletics traditions. So is Germany’s second most populous state, Bavaria, with its 14 million inhabitants, whose capital is Munich.

There are exactly one track and field athlete born in Munich who has achieved an individual Olympic victory or the World Championship and European Championship gold on outdoor tracks: Gisela Mauermayerwho won Olympic discus gold in the colors of Nazi Germany in 1936.

Mauermayer was born in Munich in 1913. There are a total of four prize winners of outdoor tracks born in the entire state of Bavaria.

The western state neighbor Baden-Württemberg is of a completely different caliber when it comes to processing peaks.

If you want to look for more connections between German athletics and Munich, you have to go back to the years before Mauermayer’s birth in the history books. Before the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the German athletics championship medals had only been contested in 1904.

However, on July 10, 1904 in Munich, only men competed for medals, and there were only two sports: the 110-meter hurdles and the high jump. At that time, however, the people of Munich had a good time, while the locals did Otto Reissner and Hans Buchheit celebrate sports victories.

After 1904, the German championships have been held in Munich only in 1972, as a warm-up for the Olympics, and in 1982 and 1992, in honor of the round years of the Olympics. Since then, the iconic stadium has been able to host only two European Championships, in 2002 and the kickers that started on Monday, which honor the 50th birthday of the 1972 Olympics.

Athletics has been absent from the stadium since the previous European Championships, with the exception of the two-day European Cup in 2007. When talking about Germany and elite athletics, all eyes turn to Berlin.

Munich’s only competition on the international calendar is the Ludwig-Jall-Sportfest, which is only a D-category competition and loses to the events of the Finnish GP series with its athlete coverage.

In recent years, the local club LG Stadtwerke München has mostly won one or two championships in the German championships. An 800 meter runner has served as the gold medalist Christina Hering, who has no fewer than ten German championships. Hering has represented his country in all outdoor track competitions since 2015, but he does not have a place in the finals.

800 meters is LG Stadtwerke München’s parade event, as Hering’s teammate Katharina Trost competed, among other things, in the semi-finals of the Tokyo Olympics last year.

Hering and Trost were part of the German team that appeared at the World Championships in Oregon in July. In addition to them, only the high jumper was responsible for the Munich expertise Tobias Potyewhich, like Hering and Trost, did not reach the final competition.

This week, many German track and field athletes have a place to wash their faces at the Olympic Stadium in Munich. But no matter what happens at the Games, will Munich be out of the picture for a decade again in a week’s time?