50 years later, Frank Shorter enters the Olympic Stadium again for the first time. Neither applause nor whistles can be heard this time as he steps into the sun. Nothing, just some construction noise from the setup for the Munich marathon this Sunday. His way leads him through the slightly faded rainbow ceiling colors and the blue sign “Guests of Honour”, no longer down through the big marathon gate as it used to be. From up here he looks at the bleachers with the lime-green bucket seats, which are empty this time. Go down the steps onto the running track. It’s like coming home, he said before, to where it all began. And how much it means to him that his wife Michelle will now see him cross the finish line a second time.
If you don’t know, you must first have this idea: that the only person who managed to celebrate an Olympic victory in Munich in 1972 in his hometown was by no means a German, but a marathon runner from the USA. But that is exactly one of those stories that made Gernot Weigl, the organizer of the Munich marathon, dream of inviting Shorter to his event in 2022 as a guest of honor years ago. And it worked. Shorter, who was born here as the son of a US Army doctor stationed in Munich, on Halloween 1947, whose family returned home a year later, who then in 1972, at the age of 24, felt a strong “inner bond” with his hometown, how he later told me, now he is strolling along the running track of the Olympic Stadium, accompanied by photographers. The sports facility that was still shaking and shaking a few weeks ago during the European Athletics Championships so that the tent roof almost blew off. Almost as if the Olympics had returned.
18,500 participants and some top athletes – the Munich marathon has big goals
This Frank Shorter, soon to be 75, previously retold his story at a press conference upstairs. You could have listened to him for hours. Before it was his turn, Managing Director Weigl had presented the numbers: a good 18,500 runners will start on Sunday, around 5,000 in the marathon itself, plus relays, traditional costumes and children’s runs. Start and finish is this stadium. And they had Agnes Keino of Kenya and Aberu Zennebe of Ethiopia on the podium, replacing the late Ethiopian Mare Dibaba, the 2015 World Marathon Champion – three African runners who, on Sunday, were seen as a significant improvement on the previous one Course record expected in Munich. Also Ethiopian Tsegaye Mekonnen, who holds the unofficial junior world record and is set to improve the men’s course record. They all symbolize the new concept of the Munich marathon, which has organized top runners for the first time in 20 years. The three gave a few soft, brief answers, little more than yes and no.
With Shorter it sounded completely different. He is a media professional and has a lot to tell. He was able to market his sporting successes very well, and at the end of the 1970s he was one of the first amateur athletes in the USA to advertise with his own name and run for prize money. He is regarded as the initiator of the running movement in the USA, was a TV commentator, a lawyer, chaired the National Anti-Doping Agency, an exciting guy who still seems somehow casual to this day. A few years ago he published an autobiography. It also deals with dark themes like his violent father, whom running helped him to escape from. It was his way of becoming different from the man who was beating him and his siblings. But of course it’s not about such things on Friday in Munich, where he has only returned for the second time since winning the Olympics. It’s about running, his passion. And around 1972.
Media professional, exciting storyteller, easy-going guy: Frank Shorter talks about his life on Friday.
(Photo: Norbert Wilhelmi / oh)
It was only the sixth marathon in Frank Shorter’s career, and he won it in 2:12:19.8 hours. He had finished fifth in the 10,000 meters a week earlier and his marathon almost ended before it really began – a support vehicle brushed him through the marathon gate shortly after leaving the stadium. But Shorter only got a few scratches. After 15 kilometers he launched the first attack and could no longer be caught. He also benefited, as he said on Friday, from the winding course, which he owed to the fact that the pursuers didn’t see him and had no idea how far he had rushed with his speed increase.
By the way, if anything, he’s not a running legend, but a living legend, he added. He values the “alive”.
The other story with Shorter and Munich that many will remember happened on his return from the track to the Olympic Stadium. Because even before he had reached the tunnel into the stadium, he heard stormy applause inside, and when he entered the stadium, it first became quiet, then the people whistled. He didn’t know if he had done something wrong, if he had upset people with anything. It was only later that he was told that a 16-year-old student had crept onto the track in front of the stadium, in running clothes and with the home-made starting number 72. The youngster initially received the applause intended for Shorter. It was only when the security forces stopped him in front of the finish line that the audience recognized his mistake and began to whistle.
On his balcony, Shorter witnesses the terrorist attack – and then decides to completely ignore the events that followed
Surprisingly, this curious story hardly found a place in the press conference. That didn’t bother him much then and now, said Shorter, he didn’t run for the applause, but to finish first. The dangling came briefly to Montreal, where he won Olympic silver four years later. Almost exactly as shortly before his return to the stadium, the applause erupted inside. He doesn’t say that this experience concerned him much more than the student in 1972 – because Waldemar Cierpinski, the winner from the GDR, was later associated with East German state doping.
And then there was another chapter to tell, because before his triumph in 1972, Shorter had also witnessed the attack that a Palestinian terrorist command carried out on the Israeli team on the morning of September 5th. He closes his eyes for a long time on the podium before he explains why he spent the night on the balcony of his room in the Olympic Village, from where he then heard the shots fired at night and was also able to watch the Israeli quarters later in the morning. Then how they would all have tried to process their shock, how they would have climbed over a barrier in front of heavily armed guards just to go for a run. “It was what we could control” – not realizing that the greater part of the drama at an airfield near Fürstenfeldbruck was still in progress. And how he decided the day before the marathon to simply stop thinking about the terrible events in which eleven Israeli athletes, a police officer and several hostage-takers were ultimately killed. “Because otherwise the terrorists would have won.”
After the pandemic, the Munich marathon wants to become bigger and sportier again, but it ushered in this on Friday with a moving look at the past of the sport.
Frank Shorter showed up for the appointment in long running gear. Later, in the stadium, he wears a traditional Bavarian jacket that Gernot Weigl had previously given him as a gift. Shorter can now always carry a bit of Munich with him on the outside, too. Inwardly, he has been doing this for a very long time.
