Quote:
Originally Posted by Karlifornia
Man....this luge death has really cast a pall over these games so far. Who knows if the mood will lighten? What was the mood like during Munich games after the execution of the Israeli team? Anyone who was around that can answer my question would find me indebted.
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I was only 5 years old at the time, so although I remember watching the events unfold, the recollections are pretty scattered. Nearly 40 years later I'd be hard pressed to swear what I "remember" and what is a collage of memory & years of seeing the footage.
A
Time article a few years ago has a pretty good description of it I think[i]
Following indignant words from the paladins of the Olympic movement, after a little mournful Beethoven, the Games of Munich went on. It's an article of faith that The Games Must Go On. For the 30 years since, the Olympics — indeed, all sports events of any great scale — have carried on, even if permanently altered by the awareness that terrorists could again strike. ... Willi Daume, president of the Munich organizing committee, at first wanted the remainder of the Games called off, but Brundage and others prevailed. "I too questioned the decision to continue," says former mayor Vogel, "but over time I came to believe that we couldn't let the Olympics come to a halt from the hand of terrorism."
So, after a memorial service on Sept. 6, the Carefree Games resumed. Many of the 80,000 people who filled the Olympic Stadium for West Germany's soccer match with Hungary carried noisemakers and waved flags, while authorities did nothing to intervene in the name of decorum. Yet when several spectators unfurled a banner reading 17 dead, already forgotten? security officers seized the sign and expelled the offenders from the grounds.