Top 100 momentsNo. 95
Munich, interrupted
Palestinian gunmen take Israeli athletes hostage. Eleven Israelis and a German officer die. The Olympics learn they are not a truce.
September 5, 1972. The Munich Games, sold as a gentle West Germany, become a hostage crisis in the Olympic village. A rescue at the airport fails. Eleven Israeli athletes and coaches are murdered. A German policeman dies. The world watches a sportscast turn into a news bulletin.
Avery Brundage says the Games must go on. They do, after a memorial. Security at every later Olympics is a response to this failure. The Olympic truce, always a hope, looks like a brochure.
The sporting results of Munich — Mark Spitz, a disputed basketball final — live in the same book as a massacre. That is the ranking: the day the village was not safe, and never fully would be again.