Athletics: Painful memory of the darkest Olympic days

Munich 1972: Mixed emotions for West Germany's track and field darling on returning to athletes' village

Like flicking a switch in the memory bank, the return of major championship competition to Munich's Olympiastadion this week will bring visions of 1972 zooming back into focus. The European athletics championships of 2002 open in the vast Bavarian arena with the qualifying round of the women's discus at 9.10 local time on Tuesday morning. It will be the first major championship track and field action in the stadium since the Olympics of 30 summers ago, when Valery Borzov blitzed to his sprint double, Dave Wottle throttled to 800m gold in his old golf cap, Lasse Viren picked himself off the floor to win the 10,000m in world record time, and Mary Peters, the pride of Belfast and of Britain, prevailed in an epic pentathlon duel with the local favourite.

There are other memories too, of course. They clicked into painful vision for Peters's beaten German rival, Heide Ecker-Rosendahl, when the key turned to re-open the old Olympic Village to the first of the 2,000 athletes arriving in the students' complex on Thursday morning. She will never forget the events of 5 September, 1972, when Palestinian terrorists broke into the same compound, across the Mittlerer Ring, Munich's 'middle ring road', to the north of the Olympic Stadium.

At 5.10am that day eight members of the Black September guerrilla group burst into the block housing the Israeli team with sub-machine guns blazing. Two Israelis were killed instantly and nine more were taken hostage. The terrorists demanded the release of 200 prisoners held in Israeli jails and safe passage for themselves out of Germany. They got as far as Furstenfeld military airport, where police sharpshooters opened fire. All nine hostages were killed in the ensuing gun battle, together with five of the terrorists and one policeman.

"When you see the pictures of the terrorist attack the memory builds up again," Ecker-Rosendahl reflects as she prepares to return to Munich, 30 years on. "It is always there in your mind and seeing the pictures brings it back immediately. If I'm in Munich, it brings it back too. I was there in the village, in fact, in April and saw the same area again. So immediately the image was in front of me.

"The West German team were in this tall block in 1972 and my room had the window looking towards the Israeli building. I could see the terrorists and the people with the guns and all that. That was er... how do you say?... We were really frightened. It's not that you know then what you know now.

"We didn't know what was going on. It was really frightening to see it. It was awful, everything that happened. It took us a few days to realise that it's over, that we're still alive, and that we have to go on."

The athletes did indeed go on. In defiance of the terrorists, the International Olympic Committee ordered the Games to resume, after a break of 34 hours and a memorial service held in the Olympiastadion. Five days after the attack Ecker-Rosendahl anchored the West German team to victory in the 4x100m relay final, holding off Renate Stecher, the East German sprinter who had been unstoppable in the 100m and 200m. It was her third medal of the Games, her second gold.

Heide Rosendahl, as she was at the time, won the long jump on 31 August and over the course of 2 and 3 September was locked in a gripping fight with Peters for the pentathlon gold. The German crowd were so engrossed they cheered for the Briton and chanted her name, despite their favouritism for the bespectacled home girl. In the last of the five events, the 200m, Rosendahl ran a scorching time of 22.95sec. Peters, though, clocked a personal best too, 24.08sec. She won by 10 points with a world record score, 4,801 points.

"Even though I didn't win," Ecker-Rosendahl says, casting her mind back to the track and field action in 1972, "my favourite memory of the Munich Games was still the pentathlon. Mary beat me to the gold, but I loved to do the different events. The pentathlon was my favourite. It's something else to be with your opponents in the stadium for two days competing together. That's what I enjoyed most of all. We were all together, having fun and fighting to see who is the best. It wasn't a fight like you see in other events. In some events, if you watch them, I get the feeling they hate each other. That never happened in the pentathlon then or in the heptathlon and decathlon now. I still see Mary occasionally, at some of the major championships. It brings back happy memories."

Ecker-Rosendahl, one of the finest all-round female athletes of all time, is 55 now. She lives in Leverkusen, where she serves on the board of the track and field section of the Bayer sporting club – the same club whose football team reached the European Cup final in May.

"We're the most successful club in track and field in Germany," she says with obvious pride. "In Munich we have 15 athletes in the German team. Martin Buss [the reigning high jump world champion] is from our club, and Charles Friedek [the 1999 triple jump world champion] and Karsten Kobbs [the hammer world champion of 1999]."

Danny Ecker is from the Bayer club too, though sadly he will not be competing in Munich. Ecker-Rosendahl's 25-year-old son is one of 10 pole vaulters who have cleared the six-metre barrier. He was selected in Germany's European championship team but withdrew on Thursday because of a shoulder problem that has been troubling him since a training trip to Martinique in March.

"Sure, I feel sorry for him," his famous mother says. "He's my son. No mother likes to see her kid get hurt and Danny really loves competing in his sport. It would have been wonderful for me to watch him in Munich but, then, he wouldn't have been in shape to do his best."

Ecker-Rosendahl will still be in the Olympiastadion this week. As a director of the Bayer Leverkusen club, she has 15 objects of interest. She also has an interest as a member of the marketing and communication committee of the European Athletic Association. And then there is the matter of the latest Olympic challenge she has chosen to undertake.

"Yes," the German star of the Munich Games says, "I'm president of the Dusseldorf Rhein-Ruhr bid for the Olympic Games of 2012." And that is one Olympic race Mary Peters, or any other British representative, would stand very little chance of winning.