The 1972 Munich Olympics celebrate their 50th anniversary this year. This edition was especially marked and bereaved by the attack perpetrated against Israeli athletes on September 5th. Eleven athletes will ultimately be killed after a hostage-taking of several hours.
The other highlight of these Games was the Olympic basketball final between the United States and the USSR, played on 9 September. In the middle of the Cold War, such a duel was already a highlight, but it was the controversial end of the match, and the result, that would change this match in the history of sport.
A little flashback to those famous last seconds. The Americans had been led in this final, accusing up to ten points behind. Then, thanks in particular to the back Kevin Joyce, they were back in the game.
three seconds of eternity
At the end of the game, Doug Collins, who will then become coach of the Bulls, finds himself on the free throw line. He succeeded in both and thus gave his side a point lead (50-49). There are then three seconds left to play. The Soviets play the throw-in but the game is stopped in the middle of the field, with one second on the clock. The confusion begins, with a time-out which would have been requested by the Soviets. The referee decides to give three seconds to play, with a new throw-in.
The USSR makes its throw-in and the pass that follows is not even really launched when the buzzer sounds. It’s over, the score appears on television screens and the Americans exult, they are Olympic champions.
Except that the referee had given the Soviets three seconds to play and, during the throw-in, the clock was still set to the second remaining before the time-out confusion. We must therefore start this throw-in again, for the third time, with three seconds on the clock.
The throw-in turns into a very long pass, which crosses the entire field and arrives in the direction of Alexander Belov. Despite two American defenders in front of him, he catches the ball, feints and then scores! For the last time in the game, we hear the buzzer and the USSR is Olympic champion by winning 51-50.
It’s historic, in terms of form, with these endless final three seconds, but also in substance. It is quite simply the first defeat for the Americans in the Olympic Games since the introduction of basketball in 1936! The anger of US players will be at the height of the earthquake.
Categorical refusal of the podium and medals
The next day, at the hotel, the players of the American team confirm what they have been saying to each other for a few hours: they will all refuse their silver medal.
“It was the only way to express our feelings about this whole story. We won this match. Twice even”interior Jim Brewer told The Athletic. “We all agreed that this decision should be unanimous”continues Doug Collins. “No one was going to accept that medal. “
They kept their word, being absent from the ceremonies and leaving their place empty on the podium. For the first time in the history of the Olympic Games, a team refuses a medal in protest.
Over time, Olympic officials will do what is necessary to make them change their minds, by multiplying letters and phone calls. But nothing helps. Fullbacks Kenny Davis and Tommy Henderson will even go very far: it is written in their wills that their family members will not be able to accept the medals after their death…
“The fact that they sent us these letters every year to tell us that our medals were still in Lausanne, if we wanted to get them back, it was funny for me who worked so close to there”says Mike Bantom, a member of the 1972 team who worked for the NBA in New York and then in Geneva. ” But I still didn’t see the point. “
What to do with medals?
To ensure that the decision of September 10, 1972 was irrevocable, winger Tom McMillen asked that the twelve medals be sent to a lawyer in Chicago, so that no player would ever come to claim theirs from the Committee. Olympic International (IOC). The lawyer in question, Donald Gallagher, then had to sell them to museums in the United States.
“It would thus become a kind of permanent memory. Otherwise, the 1972 team will somewhat fade into oblivion,” explains McMillen, who did not want to make any financial profit from this medal affair. He was even prepared to leave them in a safe in Switzerland.
What response from the IOC, in January 2022, to this request for placement in museums in the United States? No because, according to IOC lawyer Mariam Mahdavi, “this would in no way respect the spirit of an awarding of Olympic medals” and that there is “no legal basis” to satisfy this request.
The IOC even slipped a small tackle on Tom McMillen and his teammates, telling them that the Olympic body “appreciates the efforts to transform into something positive the impression left by your refusal of the prize almost 50 years ago”.
Back to square one: what to do with medals, fifty years after these Olympic Games and when the players have either died or are still locked in their 1972 decision? The main question is elsewhere according to the investigation conducted by The Athletic : first of all, where are these twelve medals?
Five medals in nature…
Because the IOC could ask the American players to come and get the medals, it would have been hard pressed to provide them if the 1972 silver medalists had all changed their minds one day or another. Indeed, according to our colleagues, five silver medals are missing. How is it possible ?
We have to go back to medal day. As we have said, the Americans were not present. This boycott prompted the organizers to change the program since, initially, this ceremony was to take place in the Olympic stadium. Without the American delegation, it is finally the Olympiahalle which hosts the event, at the end of the men’s handball tournament.
The ceremony ends and nobody, as expected, has come to claim the silver charms, nor the official papers – a kind of diploma – which confirm the results of the tournament. Two officials therefore leave with this loot.
“I took the diplomas, which I must still have somewhere, but not the medals”remembered Walther Tröger in 2019, before his death, mayor of the Olympic village in 1972 and member of the IOC. “It was Ernst Knoesel who took the medals and I think they disappeared there. “
Then, twenty years after this day in September 1972, the German Olympic Committee, chaired by Willi Daume and where Walther Tröger also officiates, proposes to give seven of the twelve medals to the IOC in Switzerland. This is why Mike Bantom received letters in the 1990s telling him that he could go to Lausanne to pick up his medal.
If seven medals are kept in Switzerland, what about the other five? ” An eighth medal will be awarded by Mr. Daume, four others are still with Mr. Ernst Knoesel, the former sports director of the Munich organizing committee”had written Tröger in 1992, in a letter in English, on a German Olympic letterhead.
…including one in the hands of a former Nazi party member
The IOC confirmed to The Athletic that the five remaining medals were never handed over by Willi Daume and Ernst Knoesel. “The IOC received seven medals from the Organizing Committee. According to our information, at the time, the other medals remained with the organizing committee. We don’t have more information about the other medals. “
The two protagonists are now deceased and their sons were unable to provide any concrete information on the fate of these five pieces of Olympic history.
“I didn’t know my father had one of the medals and I don’t know where it is”replies Kay Daume when asked the question. “My father had no last will and made no will, so I received nothing after his death. “
To make this story even more romantic, you should know that the small history of sport is intertwined with the great history of Willi Daume. This character, who died in 1996, was responsible for convincing the IOC, of which he was a member, to entrust the 1972 Olympic Games to Munich, 36 years after the infamous Games organized by Nazi Germany in 1936 in Berlin.
A Germany then led by Adolf Hitler and his political party, the NSDAP, of which Daume was a member. According to research published in 2010, we also learn that he was an informer during the Second World War and that in the family factory, which he had inherited on the death of his father, in Dortmund, there were 65 forced laborers .
Fifty years after this historic match and this incredible story of medals, the anger has never waned among the Americans. The pain and the sourness always irrigate the answers of the players.
“Whether they’re in a safe in Switzerland or in someone’s basement, it really doesn’t matter to me”concludes Mike Bantom. “If I had won a silver medal at the Olympics, I would be very proud of it and obviously I would want to have it and display it somewhere in my house, and cherish the fact that I won a medal because it’s not a shame though. Except we really didn’t feel like we lost. So I don’t care where those medals are. “
