Mention "Olympic Massacre" and most people will immediately think of the gruesome hostage-taking and subsequent deaths of members of the Israeli Olympic Team in Munich in 1972. The event overshadowed the sporting festival and was played out live on TV as a horrified global public watched on. When it ended, and the grisly deaths of eleven athletes were deemed by the IOC president Avery Brundage as insufficient cause to halt proceedings, his decision was lauded universally as the correct response - that the lofty ideals of international brotherhood which the Olympics represented should always triumph over subversive attempts to diminish or degrade them. The show - it was agreed - must go on, and now more than ever.
Today we know that somewhat more cynical and commercial logic lay behind this rather abrupt and unequivocal decision, and that countries for whom the Olympics present a gilt-edged opportunity to glory and bask in nationalistic and propagandistic recognition worldwide were never going to walk away from such a stage over something as trivial as the fate of athletes from a country who, besides one or two very important backers, was and is regarded as less than relevant by many, an anachronism by many more, and worthy of no less barbarity by a worrying number of others. Brundage spoke as much for their beliefs as he did for the stated beliefs of the Olympic Committee, and his announcement now merits and receives less than flattering analysis all these years later, not so much for its stated logic as for its suspicious haste.
But then, this was not the first time Brundage had been put in this spot, and when compared to the preceding occasion actually appears almost mundanely predictable. After all, who will entertain a crisis of conscience over eleven deaths when he has already resolved the same crisis in relation to the deaths of nine hundred?
Mexico City, on October 2nd 1968, was ten days away from hosting the same sporting extravaganza. The country's government, an autocratic regime which had already spent decades dismantling the democratic process, was finding 1968 to be a year in which they faced what at first had appeared eminently containable but which had rapidly become a threat not just to its prestige during this great showcase year but to its very existence. A small student rebellion, in many ways inspired by similar movements abroad, had rapidly escalated over the summer into what the authorities now feared would become a mass uprising.
That evening some thousands of people had assembled in The Square of the Three Cultures in the Ttatelolco region of Mexico City to hear speeches from trade unionists and others who, in recent years, had borne the brunt of the government's repressive legislation. Many of those present were students, now a highly politicised group who had fast become the vanguard of those demanding a return to democracy. The government, in what is now perceived as an act of appalling and premeditated barbarity rather than the "panic" it had once been put down to, sealed off the exits to the square with troops and commenced machine-gunning those trapped within its confines. Scores of soldiers positioned on rooftops as well as helicopter gunships sprayed the victims with thousands of rounds for over half an hour.
The next day saw no mention of this atrocity in the press, though this was about to quickly change. The city had already begun to receive the first of hundreds of journalists from around the world to cover the games and some of these not only witnessed the massacre but had been injured on the spot. The government hastily changed its stance and admitted that "twelve" fatalities had occurred, of which seven were policemen. On October 12th this was still the official line, though by now the international press contingent had done its own research and reached its own conclusions. The conservative estimate of fatalities which Avery Brundage, like everyone else, knew to be the reliable estimate, stood at nine hundred.
The games, he averred, must go on.
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