B. DUFFY/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGESMARK SPITZ WAS THE FIRST, and remains the only, Olympic athlete to win seven gold medals in one year—1972—each one breaking a world record. The fact that this champion swimmer was Jewish and triumphed in Munich, Germany—forty-five minutes from Dachau—was history-making enough. But tragic events made it even more poignant: The same night he won his seventh prize, nine Israeli athletes were taken hostage by Palestinian gunmen, who killed them the following day.“I was a Jewish swimmer at the Munich Olympic Games,” Spitz recounts by phone from his Los Angeles home. “We were fifteen miles from Dachau, and here was this Jew at the games. It’s important to remember that 1972 was the coming-out party for Germany; the nation was saying, ‘We’re here and we’re not like the regimes of thirty years before. These games will be the perfect example that the German people have come full circle.’ And then I go and win seven gold medals. And that night, the terrorists jump the fence and later kill eleven Israeli athletes.
