The Sports Factor

If there's one thing the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games should have in spades, it's security. Of course security concerns have dominated the Games in recent years.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Now if there's one thing the Beijing Games should have in spades, it's security. Those commies sure know how to keep things tight.

Of course security concerns have dominated the Games since the tragedy in Munich in 1972, and on next week's show we'll discuss the issue with someone who was there, Olympic swimmer, Graham Windeatt.

Graham Windeatt: It had a very much different feel early on in Munich, it had a very much different feel and in fact there were some parents that were snuck in to the Village, parents of the athletes who were snuck into the Village to dine with them, simply by donning a tracksuit top and being kept in the centre of a group of people as you sort of rushed through the guards effectively. But when that all changed, the passes were very closely scrutinised, even to the point of seeing if they'd been split open to change photographs etc.

Mick O'Regan: So a complete turnaround. Can I ask you, Graham, about what your personal memories are when you first heard of the tragedy that had unfolded between the Palestinian terrorists and the Israeli athletes; where were you and how did you find out?

Graham Windeatt: Yes, that was on the last night of the swimming. I was in the second-last event on the last night of the swimming, 1500 metres freestyle, and because I was a Medallist, it was off to be drug-tested where you have to rehydrate for a urine test, so it took a little while to do that. So I got back to the Village about midnight. Apparently the terrorists came in in the early hours of the following morning, so only a few hours apart from where I entered the Village.

So in the morning I got up, went around for breakfast, and the cafeteria hall where all the athletes ate probably sat 2,000, 3,000 people I suppose at tables of eight. And my memory of it is that for every two tables one way, and for every two tables the other way through this entire facility, was something like 200, 300 tables, was a fellow with a machine-gun. Had anything ever happened we would have all died in the crossfire. But that was a stark change from the day before, and with communications in those days, no mobile phones, there was so little known about it that really it was just confusion. No-one really knew what had happened. I saw two tanks come through an exterior wall; they just pulled down the fencing and brought two tanks in. It was just sort of in the early stages, mass confusion.

Mick O'Regan: And a complete and utter transformation of the idea of what it is to be in an athletes' village.

Graham Windeatt: It was. I think there was a sense of vulnerability. A good friend of mine, a swimmer from Hong Kong was actually a room a floor or two above the Israelis and so he woke to the noise and it altered him forever. He actually saw people that had been machine-gunned to death because the design that was like a step-verandah type system to the architecture, so you could actually look down on the verandah below, and he was forever altered for that, and he was actually caught in his room for I believe at least two days, because they just froze the movement of the athletes in that area. They were showing it on TV and they were bringing snipers and the like in, and they were dressed as athletes. So everybody, the tourists were dressed as athletes, the snipers were dressed as athletes in the first stages, so everybody, through loud-hailers, was just told to stay in their room. And I talked to that fellow at the closing ceremony and yes, he was forever altered.

Mick O'Regan: Former Olympic swimmer, Graham Windeatt, who's also got some interesting to say about Grant Hackett's chances in the 1500 metres freestyle.

More from Graham next week, but that's the program for this week.

Andrew Davies is the producer of The Sports Factor, with technical production this week by Jim Ussher. And my thanks to them.

Guests

Graham Windeatt
Former Australian Olympic swimmer.

Presenter

Mick O'Regan

Producer

Andrew Davies