DAthletics begins, the first two gold medals go to Germany. One in the East, finally one in the West. Heide Rosendahl shoulders the high expectations of the nation right from the first jump. With wire-rimmed glasses and red and white striped socks, she landed at 6.78 meters, the winning distance. The host country celebrates the first gold medal. It cannot be silvered. As an Olympic amateur, Heide Rosendahl can only accept benefits in kind: an iron, an egg cooker and a monthly sports aid check for the butcher.
Off to the dream ship of the East
The night before, Peter Frenkel boarded the night train in East Berlin and traveled to Munich in a sleeper car, where he moved into a room in the Olympic Village and stretched his legs a little in the Olympic Park, ten kilometers to warm up. At half past five in the afternoon he becomes Olympic champion in the 20-kilometer walk.
He parties through the night in Schwabing, while Manfred Ewald, head of the GDR team, lets him search, in panic fear of the worst case scenario that would overshadow all successes: a flight from the republic during the games against the class enemy. In the morning, Frenkel turns up in the quarters with a hangover and gets a mighty kick-off. Back in the GDR, he can still look forward to a better reward than an egg cooker: a cruise to Cuba on the MS “Völkerfreunde”, the dream ship of the East.
What else happens? Mark Spitz wins gold four and five, first over 100 meters dolphin, then with the 4 x 200 meter freestyle relay in front of the West German quartet. The flawless gymnastics Karin Janz, who will start a great medical career after the games and will help develop the first artificial disc, wins gold on the uneven bars and vault, with the West German representative in the judges’ panel of the East Germans giving a 10.0. The West German audience tends to stick with Olga Korbut and boos for minutes when her grade on the uneven bars is too bad. The Belarusian is then rewarded with gold on floor and uneven bars.
In judo, Klaus Glahn from Hanover reached the heavyweight final, where he was fooled by Dutchman Wim Ruska. At the end of the freestyle wrestling, in which the Freiburg postman Adolf Seger won the only German medal with bronze in welterweight, Alexander Medwed became Olympic champion for the third time in super heavyweight – also thanks to a victory against American Chris Taylor, who weighed eighty kilos.
Where he found the strength to do so, Jürgen Sparwasser observed in the canteen of the Olympic Village. According to the East German soccer player, Medwed (Russian for “bear”) ate eight schnitzel for breakfast. Like Heide Rosendahl, he would certainly have been happy to receive a voucher for the butcher as a prize.
