Personal Memories Of The 1972 Olympics

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Getting near that time again, and it has become a tradition of mine to post my experiences as a young American who landed a job in Munich during the 1972 Olympics. I just figure it might be an interesting footnote in the history of Olympics to pass my memory of those events on to others:

It was my first trip to Europe, and as happens, I was running out of money. I knew my visit to Innsbruck in Austria would be the end of my tour unless I got a job. I wasn’t ready to head home yet. So off I went to Munich. The Olympics were around the corner and I figured I might be able to find work there. I took the train to Munich and checked into a small hotel near Sendlinger Tur Platz. I got a room on the 4th floor and trudged up and when I got to my clean, nice room, all was fine except I didn’t see a blanket. I called to the desk, they sent a housekeeper up and she looked at me, and then the bed, and assumed I was insane. As a stupid American, I had never seen a down comforter before and assumed you slept on it (it was so huge and thick) and it never dawned on me that I would sleep under it. I apologized and felt like an idiot.
Considering my lack of hotel experience, it was all the more amazing when I went downstairs to the front desk to ask where I could find an inexpensive restaurant in the area. The portly woman behind the desk spoke English quite well and we started to talk. Within ten minutes she found out I was traveling, running out of money, looking for work in Munich for the Olympics and she offered me a job on the spot…as the night desk clerk. I was honest and told her I knew nothing about hotels, as my request for a blanket clearly showed, but she insisted I would be perfect. (They were a bit desperate to find workers at that point.) I would get free room and board, plus a salary that would allow me to save a bit and stay longer in Europe.
Not bad. Check into a hotel and get a job within an hour.
The night shift was from 11:00 PM until 7:00 AM. Mostly just to be there in case of…whatever. No one was allowed to check in during that time, so I was basically a babysitter. Pretty boring. My major task was to stay awake, buzz in latecomers and then prepare the tables for breakfast.
However, because it was the Olympics, some interesting guests started to show up. I remember one Italian couple with a daughter about 8 years old. The parents spoke no German or English, but the little girl spoke 5 languages. She actually booked them into the hotel and she would translate for them. I thought that was pretty cool for an 8 year old. Another was the mother of an Israeli Olympian Another was the mother of a member of the USA Womens Swim Team. She had had to work double shifts to afford to come to Germany to see her daughter swim, and she was touched when her co-workers surprised her with a farewell party and some extra cash for the trip. She and I hit it off well, and one night I went out with her, her daughter and several members of the American Womens Olympic swim team for dinner.
Very enlightening.
They all hated Mark Spitz.
They freely admitted he was a phenomenal swimmer and most of them predicted he would win every Gold Medal he could get, but according to them, he was the most arrogant asshole they had met in a long time.
We had a great time that night, and I was offered free tickets to go see one of their early heats in the games. Considering most events had been sold out long before, I gladly accepted! I went and it was fun to be on the Olympic site, wandering through the fantastic grounds and seeing a few events. Munich had gone all out for the Olympics. They had people on almost every street corner wearing pins that identified which languages they spoke, just so they could help tourists find their way around. However, most locals in Munich had long since hit the road. The prices for everything went up during the Olympics. An ice cream bar that normally cost about 50 cents suddenly cost triple that amount. Condos were being rented for obscene amounts of money and the traffic and congestion was horrible.

Then there was “that day” in Munich.
This is where the story gets odd.

Most people around the world were glued to the television as terrorists took over parts of the Olympic village and held the Israeli athletes hostage.
They also watched it in Berlin. And they watched it in Hamburg.
But there was absolutely no news in Munich.
Total blackout.
But the strange thing was, nobody in Munich even noticed there was a blackout of this worldwide, horrific news event. Even today, when you see footage of the terrorists in the windows, you will see people down on the Olympic site happily walking around eating ice cream and taking photos. We didn’t know anything that was happening. Apparently they wanted to keep the news off the air in Munich for fear other terrorists would see it and do something else.
My first clue was when the mother of the Israeli Olympic team member came to the desk, with two strange men, and asked to check out.
She seemed nervous and said to me, “I want to check out of my room now.”
I was surprised. She was so excited about the Games when I first met her.
“Why? The Olympics aren’t over yet and you have a room for another week.”
One of the strange men almost barked at me and said, “Didn’t you hear her. She wants to check out!”
I got the hint, gave her the final bill which one of the men paid and off they went.
I thought that a bit odd.
Then the American mother came into the hotel and was all chipper. She had just been to the events and her daughter was making it into the finals. She obviously had not picked up on anything either.
Then, a few hours later, I got a call from my mother in Illinois asking if I was alright. She told me all the phone lines to Munich had been busy for the past half day and she sounded very upset.
“What’s wrong? Did somebody die?” I asked.
“Nobody knows how many died yet.”
Now I was confused. It took ten minutes for my mother to explain what had been happening in Munich, and then suddenly all hell broke lose. People were running through the hotel and everybody was coming to the desk. People were bombarding me with questions. It was as if a dam had broken and everyone was getting phone calls, and suddenly the news was on television and word was out in Munich. The events of the day were over and we were getting all of our news in the past tense.
The American mother came tearing down the stairs and I saw her heading off to the Olympic Village. When she came back, she told me all was well with her daughter and her friends, and she heard they slipped Mark Spitz off in a private plane as he was Jewish and they didn’t know if he was a target. I remember feeling bad about what we had all said about him earlier in the week.
Sadly, I later found out the son of the Israeli woman who had suddenly checked out of the hotel died in the attack that day. He was a wrestler.
The rest of the Olympics were a blur to me.
I still find it hard to believe nobody knew anything while it was happening. Granted, this was long before cell phones, internet and cable television. But still, to this day, I look at footage of the events of that day and am amazed to think I was there – yet I, like most of the people in Munich, didn’t have a clue what was happening.
And even today, when I see a report on the 1972 Olympics, I watch to see what I missed – to see it how it all happened, despite the fact that I was there.

2

I was only 9. The images of terrorists have stuck with me as the embodiment of evil. I remember Mark Spitz winning a bunch of medals but I don’t remember it being in the 1972 Olympics, which is to say that the terrorists pushed everything else from my memory.

3

*Danke schoen * for your account, Dmark. I hadn’t known about the local news blackout; the next time I see footage of the Munich Games tragedy, I’ll better weigh any glimpses of obliviously happy and distracted locals and not automatically ascribe a sinister antisemitic callousness to them.

IIRC, the wrestler was the first athlete killed, while trying to prevent the terrorists from entering their rooms. He was a true hero.

4

Thank you for this account, DMark.

5

Wow… Thank you for sharing this. I have not read your account before and this puts it in a fascinating and chilling perspective. With that tragedy looking over the events, and the turmoil in the world today, I honestly wonder why any country would want to host the Olympics.

6

I was paying close attention to that Olympics because a friend and classmate of mine was swimming against Spitz in the 200 Butterfly. (He took the Bronze.) After that it went on the back burner until…

7

**Pardon me for bumping my own, old thread. **

I figure bumping this after four years is appropriate, now that the Olympics in London are around the corner.

It is still hard to believe there was that news blackout in the very city where everything was happening. Granted, I can understand doing it for security reasons - but this would [del]probably[/del] be impossible today with all of the technology available.

So, even though I was at the epicenter of one of the biggest news stories, and the rest of the world was glued to their TV sets, we were clueless. I just recently found this article about an American who was on the US Wrestling Team and his comments about the '72 Olympics and how clueless they too were, and how difficult it was to then go back and finish the games.

So again, pardon the bump of this ancient thread, but just thought it might be an interesting historical footnote when you are gathered around the TV watching the upcoming Olympics.

8

Thanks for bumping this. I didn’t catch it the first time around.

9

Thanks for bumping it, I missed it the first time. I was 18 in 1972 and very interested in the swimming competition. I remember feeling shocked that they resumed the competition after a one-day pause. That just seemed wrong to me.

10

I was 10 at the time, so I don’t remember much, and most of what I do remember has been mentioned a number of times in the meantime, but here is what I do remember from watching that Olympics:

[ul]
[li]“That basketball game” (did you know: USA and USSR met only once in the Olympics after that before Lithuania started competing separately, in 1988, and USSR won again, in part because that was the first Olympics with the 3-point arc and pretty much every country except the USA had figured out how much of a weapon it was)[/li][li]Olga Korbut[/li][li]Mark Spitz[/li][li]The “day off” (as a result, the closing ceremony was moved to a Monday, IIRC)[/li][li]Frank Shorter entering the stadium at the end of the marathon to a chorus of boos - they were booing some impostor[/li][li]Dave Wottle’s 800m win[/li][li]A scene of a basketball team and a referee waiting for the Egyptian team to show up (they withdrew from the Olympics after the attack on the Israelis - remember, Egypt was still in the “Israel doesn’t exist” camp back then)[/li][li]The torch going out during a massive rainstorm, and somebody relighting it with what I think was a newspaper lit from a lighter (and when the IOC heard about this, they had the torch extinguished again, and re-lit from one of the lamps that was lit from the flame lit in Greece).[/li][li]Jim Ryun falling in the 1500, and missing his last chance to win a gold medal.[/li][li]Two of USA’s top 100m runners being disqualified because their coach misread the schedule for the early rounds.[/li][/ul]
Also, I remember eating a lot of McDonald’s that year; it was the first year of its promotion where certain items had tickets with Olympic events on them, and if USA won a medal, you won something - but back then, if USA won multiple medals in an event, you could win multiple prizes (starting in 1976, it was “one item per event”). (Also, for some reason, the McD’s near where I lived gave out milk shakes for a bronze medal rather than “regular-size” (i.e. small) soft drinks.)

11

I don’t remember seeing this thread the first time, so thank you very much for posting and bumping it. It’s fascinating. It’s also interesting to revisit now because there has been some controversy about the issue of marking that anniversary.

12

Me, too! I was in high school, and remember being glued to the TV, on the phone in my parents’ room with my friend Nancy, watching the whole thing unfold.

13

Thanks for the bump - very interesting.

The way I heard it, one of the very numerous failures of the rescue attempt was that the terrorists knew the operation against them was commencing because they were watching it on TV. If that’s true then the media blackout didn’t last for long enough. Can anyone confirm this?

14

These were the first Olympics I watched. I was of course riveted by the story.

Years later, in the 80’s(?), I saw Jim McCay in an airport. I went over and thanked him for his coverage of that and introducing me to both sports and news.

15

No. My only familiarity with the ins and outs of the massacre is the Wikipedia entry, but it describes a total shit show where the police got wrong almost everything they could have possibly gotten wrong. They were wrong about the number of hostage takers, didn’t have really trained snipers and not enough of them, bad communication, the police abandoning their plan without telling everybody, wrong positioning of the helicopter that was taking the terrorists to the airport, and more. But no, the terrorists were not watching the TV coverage at the time. They were at an airport, expecting they were going to be flown to Egypt. It was an ambush, but like I said, none of it went right.

16

My only contemporary recollection of it was one of my classmates mentioning the basketball game, in which the judges kept giving the *Evil Empire extra time on the clock. My family was not sports oriented, so whatever we would have been watching, it wasn’t the Olympics.

*BTW, just in case you didn’t know. The Soviets took a 7-0 lead, and were ahead 26-21 by halftime. The ONLY time the US was ahead was when there was :03 left on the clock. They had really fought back for a last second win after trailing the whole game, only to lose it because of the judges.

17

Does anyone know of a good book about the 1972 Olympics?

18

I was in the fourth grade during the '72 Olympic Games, and my class was paying a lot of attention to them because our teacher was the aunt of the marathon runner Frank Shorter. Needless to say, the Games left quite an impression on us, for the worst possible reasons. :frowning: