Special thanks this week
goes to Jerome Casey, my old friend and fellow enthusiast for all things
sporty, who gave me the idea and source material for this blog by directing me to the events of the 1972 Munich Olympics.
The politicization of sport
has probably been around for as long as organized sport itself. In earlier
blogs I have referred to the strong political and military associations of the
first ‘marathon’ https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-first-marathon-as-we-now-know-it.html, when Pheidippides ran to Athens to announce a
great victory over the Persians, right through to the many ‘lost’ Olympic
medals won by Irish athletes when competing for other nations, especially the
United Kingdom and the United States https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/03/olympian-warfare-art-and-tipperary.html, along with the tragic events of
almost exactly a century ago in Croke Park https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/03/bloody-sunday-1920.html
Michael Hogan (1896-1920), Tipperary footballer murdered by British forces while playing against Dublin in Croke Park on Bloody Sunday, November 21st 1920 and after whom the Hogan Stand is named.
Cold War Sport
At no time in history was
the politicization of sport so acute and intense as during the Cold War in the
second half of the 20th Century and a few more Sportyman blogs relating to the
early years and then the final years of that conflict highlight how sport can
be so overshadowed by darker, political forces.
In the case of individuals
such as Emil and Dana Zatopek, the beauty of sport was embodied not just in
their individual triumphs but in their subsequent ability to make lifelong
friendships that transcended the deep political and cultural divides of their
day https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/03/emil-and-dana-olympian-love-affair.html and https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/03/emil-zatopek-and-pandemic-running.html. In the case of Eamonn Coughlan at the World
Championships in 1983, the beauty of sport was embodied in showing how a plucky
little island nation could take on the might of the Soviet Union and win https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/03/memories-of-helsinki.html
And if the Cold War was the
peak of sports politicization, then surely the 1972 Munich Olympics was the
darkest episode of that peak. Along with the simmering and potentially
catastrophic tensions between the United States and the USSR in 1972, Middle
Eastern tensions also spilled over into the sporting domain, with eleven
Israeli athletes kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists in Munich.
In sporting terms, however, events
reached boiling point in Munich in the Men’s Basketball final, featuring the
two key foes of the Cold War.
Being an American game, the Olympic
gold medal in basketball was generally taken as an automatic entitlement for
the American team and they had won all seven previous Olympic men’s finals in
the sport, going back to 1936.
In the red corner: the USSR basketball team for the 1972 Olympics
From the outset, however,
this final was clearly not going to be a straightforward win for the United
States. In fact, they trailed their Cold War foes for the entire duration of an
ill-tempered game, right until the very end.
As my only real experience of
basketball viewing was in recently watching the absorbing Michael Jordan
Netflix documentary ‘The Last Dance’, I will not even try to describe the events
of those last few seconds of play in the 1972 basketball final.
Michael Jordan's Netflix epic - an absorbing series, but pales in comparison to the story of 1972
So instead of me trying to describe it, just click on the link below and let the drama unfold all over again.
And just make sure you watch it to the very end…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwTPG792LG8
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