1972 Summer Olympics

Games of the XX Olympiad
Host city Munich, West Germany
Motto 'The Happy Games'
Nations participating 121
Athletes participating 7,134 (6,075 men, 1,059 women)
Events 195 in 21 sports
Opening ceremony August 26
Closing ceremony September 10
Officially opened by President Gustav Heinemann
Athlete's Oath Heidi Schüller
Judge's Oath Heinz Pollay
Olympic Torch Günther Zahn
Stadium Olympic Stadium

The 1972 Summer Olympics (German: Olympische Sommerspiele 1972), officially known as the Games of the XX Olympiad, was an international multi-sport event held in Munich, West Germany, from August 26 to September 11, 1972.

The sporting nature of the event was largely overshadowed by the Munich massacre in which eleven Israeli athletes and coaches and a West German police officer were killed. Five Black September Palestinian terrorists died.

The 1972 Summer Olympics were the second Summer Olympics to be held in Germany, after the 1936 Games in Berlin, which had taken place under the Nazi regime. Mindful of the connection, the West German Government was eager to take the opportunity of the Munich Olympics to present a new, democratic and optimistic Germany to the world, as shown by the Games' official motto, "Die Heiteren Spiele",[1] or "the cheerful Games".[2] The logo of the Games was a blue solar logo (the "Bright Sun") by Otl Aicher, the designer and director of the visual conception commission.[3] The Olympic mascot, the dachshund "Waldi", was the first officially named Olympic mascot. The Olympic Fanfare[4] was composed by Herbert Rehbein, a companion of Bert Kaempfert.

The Olympic Park (Olympiapark) is based on Frei Otto's plans and after the Games became a Munich landmark. The competition sites, designed by architect Günther Behnisch, included the Olympic swimming hall, the Olympics Hall (Olympiahalle, a multipurpose facility) and the Olympic Stadium (Olympiastadion), and an Olympic village very close to the park. The design of the stadium was considered revolutionary, with sweeping canopies of acrylic glass stabilized by metal ropes, used on such a large scale for the first time.[5]

Host city selection

1972 Summer Olympics bidding results[6]
City Country Round 1 Round 2
Munich  West Germany 29 31
Madrid Francoist Spain Spain 16 16
Montréal  Canada 6 13
Detroit  United States 6 —

Munich won its Olympic bid on April 26, 1966, at the 64th IOC Session at Rome, Italy, over bids presented by Detroit, Madrid, and Montréal. Montreal would eventually host the following Olympic games in 1976.[7]

Munich massacre

Main article: Munich massacre

The Games were largely overshadowed by what has come to be known as the "Munich massacre". On September 5, a group of eight members of the Black September Palestinian terrorist organization broke into the Olympic Village and took nine Israeli athletes, coaches and officials hostage in their apartments. Two of the hostages who resisted were killed in the first moments of the break-in; the subsequent standoff in the Olympic Village lasted for almost 18 hours.

Late in the evening of September 5, the terrorists and their hostages were transferred by helicopter to the military airport of Fürstenfeldbruck, ostensibly to board a plane bound for an undetermined Arab country. The German authorities planned to ambush them there, but underestimated the numbers of their opposition and were thus undermanned. During a botched rescue attempt, all of the Israeli hostages were killed. Four of them were shot, then incinerated when one of the terrorists detonated a grenade inside the helicopter in which the hostages were sitting. The five remaining hostages were then machine-gunned to death.

All but three of the terrorists were killed as well. Although arrested and imprisoned pending trial, they were released by the West German government on October 29, 1972, in exchange for a hijacked Lufthansa jet. Two of those three were supposedly hunted down and assassinated later by the Mossad.[8] Jamal Al-Gashey, who is believed to be the sole survivor, is still living today in hiding in an unspecified African country with his wife and two children. The Olympic events were suspended several hours after the initial attack, but once the incident was concluded, Avery Brundage, the International Olympic Committee president, declared that "the Games must go on". A memorial ceremony was then held in the Olympic stadium, and the competitions resumed after a stoppage of 24 hours. The attack prompted heightened security at subsequent Olympics beginning with the 1976 Winter Olympics. Security at Olympics was heightened further beginning with the 2002 Winter Olympics, as they were the first to take place since September 11, 2001.

The massacre led the German federal government to re-examine its anti-terrorism policies, which at the time were dominated by a pacifist approach adopted after World War II. This led to the creation of the elite counter-terrorist unit GSG 9, similar to the British SAS. It also led Israel to launch an aggressive campaign known as Operation Wrath of God, in which those suspected of involvement were systematically tracked down and assassinated.

The events of the Munich massacre were chronicled in the Oscar-winning documentary, One Day in September.[9] An account of the aftermath is also dramatized in three films: the 1976 made-for-TV movie 21 Hours at Munich, the 1986 made-for-TV movie Sword of Gideon[10] and Steven Spielberg's 2005 film Munich.[11] In her film 1972, Artist Sarah Morris interviews Dr. Georg Sieber, a former police psychiatrist who advised the Olympics' security team, about the events and aftermath of Black September.[12]

Highlights

Otl Aicher's signage pictograms designed for the Munich Olympic Games
Munich Olympics commemorative 10-mark coin, 1972

Venues

Medals awarded

The 1972 Summer Olympic programme featured 195 events in the following 21 sports:

Demonstration sports

Calendar

All times are in Central European Time (UTC+1)
 ● Opening ceremony   Event competitions  ● Event finals  ● Closing ceremony
Date August September
26th
Sat		27th
Sun		28th
Mon		29th
Tue		30th
Wed		31st
Thu		1st
Fri		2nd
Sat		3rd
Sun		4th
Mon		5th
Tue		6th
Wed		7th
Thu		8th
Fri		9th
Sat		10th
Sun		11th
Mon
Archery ● ●
Athletics ● ● ● ● ● ●
● ● ●		 ● ● ●
● ● ●		 ●
● ●		 ● ● ●
● ● ● ●		 ● ● ●
● ●		 ● ● ● ●
● ● ● ●
Basketball ●
Boxing ● ● ●
● ● ● ●
● ● ● ●
Canoeing ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
● ● ● ●
Cycling ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Diving ● ● ● ●
Equestrian ● ● ● ● ● ●
Fencing ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Field hockey ●
Football (soccer) ●
Gymnastics ● ● ● ● ● ●
● ●		 ● ● ●
● ● ●
Handball ●
Judo ● ● ● ● ● ●
Modern pentathlon ● ●
Rowing ● ● ● ●
● ● ●
Sailing ● ● ●
● ● ●
Shooting ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Swimming ●
● ●		 ● ●
● ●		 ● ●
● ●		 ●
● ●		 ●
● ●		 ● ●
● ●		 ● ●
● ●		 ● ●
● ●
Volleyball ● ●
Water polo ●
Weightlifting ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Wrestling ● ●
● ● ● ●
● ● ● ●		 ● ●
● ● ● ●
● ● ● ●
Total gold medals 2 8 8 13 27 16 21 14 13 2 16 3 26 23 1
Ceremonies ● ●
Date 26th
Sat		27th
Sun		28th
Mon		29th
Tue		30th
Wed		31st
Thu		1st
Fri		2nd
Sat		3rd
Sun		4th
Mon		5th
Tue		6th
Wed		7th
Thu		8th
Fri		9th
Sat		10th
Sun		11th
Mon
August September

Medal count

These are the top ten nations that won medals at the 1972 Games.

Rank Nation Gold Silver Bronze Total
1 Soviet Union 50272299
2 United States 33313094
3 East Germany 20232366
4 West Germany 13111640
5 Japan 138829
6 Australia 87217
7 Poland 75921
8 Hungary 6131635
9 Bulgaria 610521
10 Italy 531018
Key

  *   Host nation (West Germany)

Participating National Olympic Committees

Participants
Number of competitors per nation.

Eleven nations made their first Olympic appearance in Munich: Albania, Dahomey (now Benin), Gabon, North Korea, Lesotho, Malawi, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Swaziland, Togo, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso).

The Parade of Nations was organised according to the German alphabet, with the first country following Greece being Egypt, whilst East Germany was referred to as "DDR".[15]

Rhodesia's invitation to take part in the 1972 Summer Games was withdrawn by the International Olympic Committee four days before the opening ceremony, in response to African countries' protests against the Rhodesian government. (Rhodesia did, however, compete in the 1972 Summer Paralympics, held a little earlier in Heidelberg.)[16][17]

Participating National Olympic Committees

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "Ein Geschenk der Deutschen an sich selbst". DER SPIEGEL 35/1972. August 21, 1972. … für die versprochene Heiterkeit der Spiele, die den Berliner Monumentalismus von 1936 vergessen machen und dem Image der Bundesrepublik in aller Welt aufhelfen sollen
  2. ↑ Digitized version of the Official Report of the Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXth Olympiad Munich 1972 (Volume 2) (PDF) (in German). proSport GmbH & Co. KG. München Ed. Herbert Kunze. 1972. p. 22. … the theme of the "cheerful Games"…
  3. ↑ "Official Emblem – Munich 1972 Olympics". Retrieved April 8, 2013.
  4. ↑ Herbert Rehbein: Olympic Fanfare Munich 1972 (TV Intro)
  5. ↑ Uhrig, Klaus (March 20, 2014). "Die gebaute Utopie: Das Münchner Olympiastadion" (in German). Retrieved February 13, 2015.
  6. ↑ "Past Olympic host city election results". GamesBids. Archived from the original on 17 March 2011. Retrieved 17 March 2011.
  7. ↑ "IOC VOTE HISTORY". aldaver.com.
  8. ↑ Countering Terrorism: The Israeli Response To The 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre And The Development Of Independence Covert Action Teams, M.A. thesis by Alexander B. Calahan at Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 1995.
  9. ↑ Deming, Mark. "Movies – One Day in September (1999)". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 May 2015.
  10. ↑ "Television – Sword of Gideon". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 May 2015.
  11. ↑ Dargis, Manohla. "An Action Film About the Need to Talk". nytimes.com. The New York Times. Retrieved 6 May 2015.
  12. ↑ Herbert, Martin. "Sarah Morris". frieze.com. Frieze Magazine. Retrieved 6 May 2015.
  13. ↑ "USA Basketball". Archived from the original on 2007-08-22.
  14. ↑ "120 years, 120 stories (Part 15) : Soviets beat the Americans amidst controversies involving communist judges". Retrieved March 4, 2016.
  15. ↑ Munich 1972 Opening Ceremony on YouTube
  16. ↑ "1972: Rhodesia out of Olympics"
  17. ↑ "Rhodesia expelled", Montreal Gazette, August 23, 1972

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to 1972 Summer Olympics.

Further reading

Preceded by
Mexico City		 Summer Olympic Games
Munich
XX Olympiad (1972) 		Succeeded by
Montreal
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