Spain ’92 / A Medal Year : Postscript : ’72 Olympics: Where Tragedy, Victory Clashed : Six athletes recall traumatic Munich Games where 11 Israelis were slain.

When the organizers of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich built the main stadium atop the former airfield where Adolf Hitler and Britain’s Neville Chamberlain proclaimed “Peace in our time” just one year before the beginning of World War II, the symbolism was not lost on the world.

The Games were to be, as the president of the organizing committee said, “the world’s gift of renewed trust in Germany.”

On the field of play, those Games produced some of history’s most memorable Olympic moments.

American swimmer Mark Spitz, Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut and Cuban boxer Teofilo Stevenson became sports legends. The Soviet Union beat the United States in a basketball championship game so controversial that it still incites arguments today; U.S. track coaches forgot to tell two of their best sprinters when to show up at the starting line for the 100 meters, and U.S. swimmer Rick DeMont lost his gold medal when he tested positive for a banned stimulant found in his asthma medication.

But all of those events were rendered insignificant on Sept. 5, 1972, when Palestinian terrorists gained admittance to the athletes’ village and murdered 11 Israelis. “This was the ultimate unthinkable--terrorism as a spectator sport,” Olympic historian John Lucas has written. Thus ended the Germans’ illusions about an Olympics they had advertised as “The Serene Games.”

Twenty years later, those dramatic Munich Games still stir powerful images for six athletes who were there.

Olga Connolly

Fifteen years after she became a U.S. citizen through her marriage to hammer thrower Harold Connolly, Olga Fikotova Connolly experienced her most cherished Olympic moment since winning a gold medal as a Czechoslovakian discus thrower in 1956. In the 1972 Summer Olympics, her fifth overall and fourth as a member of the U.S. team, she was elected by teammates to carry the American flag in the opening ceremony.

Because of her outspoken stance against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, U.S. Olympic Committee officials objected to her selection, finally relenting when Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) came to her defense. But the debate did nothing to detract from the honor she felt.

“All the controversy was so insignificant compared to the fact I could carry the flag,” she said. “It was very honestly so profound an experience for me, like I had been promoted to a first-class U.S. citizen.”

Later during the Munich Games, she was at the center of another controversy when she and other athletes prepared a petition on behalf of world peace that they planned to send to the United Nations. But organizing committee officials would not allow them to distribute it in the athletes’ village.

“They said that it would be mixing politics with sports,” she said. “After what happened to the Israeli athletes, I thought that was a joke.”

Connolly, 59, remains committed to causes. The supervisor of preschool and senior citizens programs at San Pedro’s Toberman Settlement House, she also describes herself as a feminist, environmentalist and animal rights activist.

Olga Korbut

“A reporter asked me recently how it feels to be the Babe Ruth or Mohammad Ali of gymnastics, and the question shocked me,” Olga Korbut said. “I still don’t feel special. Maybe I need another 20 years.”

In 1972, Korbut was selected to the Soviet Union’s Olympic team as an alternate and competed at Munich only because of an injury to a teammate. But before the Games ended, she won three gold medals, one silver and the hearts of all who watched her.

In a refreshing contrast to her stoic teammates, she presented the human face of a Soviet teen-ager to the world, smiling when she succeeded and crying when she failed. “When I visited the White House later that year, President Nixon told me that I did more to further relations between our two countries than our embassies did in five years,” she said.

But she, like most Soviet athletes, was sheltered from politics. The gymnasts left Munich when they finished competing to start a world tour, and authorities did not tell them about the terrorist attack until they returned home several weeks later.

Korbut, 37, now lives in Atlanta, where she coaches young gymnasts. But her life no longer revolves solely around the sport. She established a foundation last year for children from her native Belarus--a former Soviet republic turned independent country--who were contaminated as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Mark Spitz

After winning gold medals in his first five events at Munich, swimmer Mark Spitz almost withdrew from the sixth, the 100-meter freestyle, because he felt he might tarnish his perfect record by losing.

“I was tired,” he said. “But if I had not swam that race, I would have regretted it for the rest of my life.”

Spitz not only won the race but returned later the same night to add a seventh gold medal--and a seventh world record--in a relay, becoming the most decorated athlete ever in a single Olympics.

Before he had a chance to reflect on his accomplishments, the terrorists had infiltrated the athletes’ village. And when Spitz appeared at a news conference that day, his responses to questions about the situation were interpreted by some reporters as cold and insensitive. But his friends recalled later that he was “petrified” with fear.

Concerned that Spitz might be in danger because he is Jewish, authorities whisked him from the village and to a hotel. Less than 24 hours later, he was on a plane to London, then to the United States.

“Somebody was speculating: ‘Well, what if you had to deal with competing after (the attack)?’ ” he says today. “I said, ‘I don’t know what I would have done.’ It was unbelievable, terrible.”

Once home, he embarked on a lucrative career as a commercial spokesman, using the money he earned to start a successful real estate business in Beverly Hills.

Ivan Edeshko

From the time basketball became a medal sport in 1936, the United States did not lose in the Olympics until the championship game in 1972. The Soviet Union needed two replays of the final three seconds before it finally scored the game-winning basket, igniting a controversy that still burns 20 years later in the memories of the vanquished.

The U.S. players refused to accept their silver medals at Munich and twice since have spurned overtures by the International Olympic Committee to award them.

Ivan Edeshko was inserted into the game after the first replay, specifically to throw the length-of-the-floor pass that found its way into the hands of Alexander Belov, who scored on a layup as time expired to give the Soviets the 51-50 victory.

“Neither we nor the Americans were to blame for the time confusion (at the end of the game),” said Edeshko, now a coach in Moscow for the Central Army Sports Club team in the Commonwealth of Independent States’ premier league. “It was a technical fault, and the fault of the panel of judges.

“The Americans should not be sore at us. Let them remember how we played and led absolutely most of the game. I have no doubts, and no one has, that the American basketball is far superior to anywhere else in the world. But we did deserve the victory.

“But even now, 20 years later, I can’t help feeling its bittersweet taste because of this controversy.”

Esther Roth

When Israeli Esther Roth finished with one of the fastest times in the second round of the 100-meter hurdles to advance to the semifinals in 1972, her coach, Amitzur Shapira, met her at the end of the track.

“Esther, I am so happy,” she recalls him telling her. “This is my happy day.”

Early the next morning, Roth and teammates who were staying in the athletes’ village were awakened by shouts. Word spread that Palestinian terrorists had invaded the quarters of the Israeli men’s team. Before the siege ended, the terrorists murdered 11 Israelis, including Shapira.

Although the Olympics resumed after a day of mourning, the Israelis withdrew and returned home.

Four years later, Roth, at age 23, competed in the Olympics at Montreal and became the first Israeli track and field finalist, finishing sixth in the high hurdles. That remains the highest finish by any Israeli in the sport.

Roth today lives near Tel Aviv and is on the staff of the Wingate Institute of Physical Education and Sport, the Middle East’s only college devoted to athletics, where each year there is a memorial service for Shapira. Roth’s 18-year-old son is one of Israel’s top fencers.

“If he goes on to international competition, of course I will worry,” she said.

Wayne Collett

Four years after Tommie Smith and John Carlos created a furor by giving a black-power salute on the victory stand at Mexico City, two other U.S. track sprinters, Vince Matthews and Wayne Collett, became objects of the IOC’s wrath at Munich for failing to stand at attention during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” after their one-two finish in the 400 meters.

Their lack of respect for the ritual drew jeers from the crowd and a suspension for the remainder of the Games from the IOC. That could have cost each a gold medal because they had been selected to run for the United States’ favored 1,600-meter relay team.

In an interview afterward, Collett said: “I couldn’t stand there and sing the words (to the national anthem) because I don’t believe they’re true. I wish they were. I think we have the potential to have a beautiful country, but I don’t think we do.”

Collett, now a Culver City lawyer, says the events of the last 20 years have not changed his mind.

“I still have strong feelings about the issues that were raised, and I don’t apologize for what I did,” he said.

But Collett believes that the IOC overreacted to his and Matthews’ actions, or non-actions, particularly in light of the terrorist attack 48 hours earlier.

“In retrospect, I think it was appropriate for the Games to continue. But then, it seemed crazy. I wanted to go home. It changed the Olympics forever. You talk about loss of innocence. . . .”

Special correspondents Sergei L. Loiko in Moscow and Dianna Kahn in Jerusalem contributed to this story.