INNOCENCE LOST

The celebration raged through the Munich night, into the wee hours of the morning. Swimmer Steve Furniss, the proud owner of a bronze medal won the day before, stumbled back into the Olympic Village around 3 a.m. He hopped a fence, shuffled back to his room and fell asleep.

At 10, Furniss threw on some clothes and headed to the dining hall. He heard something about terrorists and hostages and saw officials gesturing frantically in various directions. But he was so tired and hungry that he didn’t ask, or comprehend, what had happened. So he wolfed down some breakfast and headed back to the room he shared with several U.S. teammates.

“I turned down the hallway and there were two German

soldiers,” Furniss said. “One started yelling at me and the other pointed his weapon at my head. . . .

“Mark Spitz stuck his head out the door and started yelling, ‘Nein, nein, he’s one of us.’ ”

Sport and politics go together like track and field, particularly on the global stage that the Olympic Games provide. On the field, the nationalistic trappings include medal counts listed by country, winners saluted with national anthems and athletes marching behind national flags. And, with the world’s media assembled to spread the word, the sporting festival has included bombs and boycotts and all manner of protests.

But never had a political agenda intruded so shockingly and so tragically as it did on Sept. 5, 1972.

Palestinian terrorists hopped the fence into the athletes’ village, just as Furniss had done less than an hour before. The guerrillas stormed the building of the Israeli delegation and took 11 athletes and coaches hostage, demanding that Israel release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Israel refused.

By the end of the day, all 11 Israeli hostages were dead.

Furniss, who attended Foothill High, and Gary Hall, who attended Rancho Alamitos High, shared a room with Spitz on the darkest day in the history of the Games.

After the terrorist strike, German police charged into the building housing the U.S. swimmers and whisked Spitz away. German authorities were concerned that Spitz, who had won a record seven gold medals, would be targeted too, because he is Jewish.

“They literally got Mark out in a black Mercedes,” Hall said. “They hid him in the trunk and got him out of there as quickly as they could.”

Four years later, Furniss and Hall swam in the Olympics again, this time in Montreal, where the village was surrounded by barbed wire, metal detectors and guards with machine guns.

The Olympic experience had changed forever, which Furniss and Hall could foresee on Sept. 6, 1972, the day the Games paused so the dead athletes could be mourned.

“We all thought it was the end of the Olympics,” Hall said. “The village was like a ghost town. Everyone went to their rooms and just sat there. It was a sad, depressing feeling, where before everything had been so joyous.”

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Terrorism struck the Games again in 1996 when a bomb detonated in Atlanta’s Centennial Park, and swimmer Janet Evans of Placentia became an international poster child for fright. As the bomb exploded, she flinched and ducked during an interview on German television, an image of horror replayed around the world.

“At first I thought it was an earthquake because everything shook,” Evans said.

The explosion, which killed one Atlanta woman, rattled the athletes of the world. The intense security surrounding the Olympic village could not protect athletes venturing outside, even in a park designed as a place for the community to gather and celebrate the Games.

Said Evans: “I was kind of scared the rest of the Olympics to go out by myself. How strange was that?”

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The politics of the Games also include boycotts, long a favorite Olympic sport.

Six countries boycotted the 1956 Melbourne Games--Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary, and Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq to protest the seizure of the Suez Canal by British, French and Israeli forces. In 1976, as part of a campaign to isolate a South African regime that sanctioned racial segregation, 30 African nations boycotted the Montreal Games because the International Olympic Committee refused to suspend New Zealand after one of its rugby teams had played in South Africa.

In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt resisted widespread calls for the United States to boycott the Berlin Games to protest Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. In 1980, however, President Jimmy Carter kept U.S. athletes home, boycotting the Moscow Games to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The pain of the 1980 boycott lingers for swimmer Brian Goodell and high jumper Dwight Stones. Goodell, from Mission Viejo, won two gold medals in Montreal, but did not get the chance to repeat. Stones, from Huntington Beach, won bronze medals in Munich and Montreal.

“It did a tremendous amount of damage to the Olympic movement in this country,” Stones said. “It irritates the hell out of me whenever I see Jimmy Carter getting some award or another for his humanitarian work. Jimmy Carter was the Saddam Hussein of the Olympic Games for what he did. He was an ignorant fool who surrounded himself with bigger fools.”

Said Goodell: “There were so many other things this country could have done to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan, but we did the least effective one. If I’m a vegetarian and I want people to stop eating meat, I don’t tell people they can’t go to a baseball game because they sell hot dogs there.

“It was the easy thing for Carter to do. It hurt 800-900 athletes and that is not a large voting bloc.”

Carter did not respond to a call seeking comment. Officials in his administration have conceded the boycott did nothing to force the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, but argued that it did provide a powerful symbol of global rebuke--U.S. officials persuaded 60 countries to join the boycott--without military intervention and the risk of losing American lives.

Four years later, when the Olympics came to Los Angeles, the Soviet Union staged what was widely considered to be a retaliatory boycott.

“The Soviets were even more ignorant,” Stones said. “It was like they said, ‘You were stupid four years ago, now watch how stupid we can be.’ ”

The Soviet boycott affected American athletes too. Gymnast Peter Vidmar of Trabuco Canyon won three gold medals in 1984, yet he heard NBC commentators at the 1996 Atlanta Games use phrases like “this is the finest performance in a non-boycotted Olympic Games.”

“Every time I hear that, I think, ‘I guess they’re talking about my Games,’ ” Vidmar said. “And that’s OK. Because common sense says there were medals that went to American and Chinese and Japanese gymnasts that probably would have gone to some Soviet gymnasts at the time.

“The comforting thing for me is when I won my gold medal on the pommel horse, I scored a perfect 10. I know they weren’t giving out 10.5s to Russians.”

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Sports with subjective judging were prone to suggestions of political interference, particularly during the Cold War, when leaders of many nations were eager to use the Olympic medal count as proof of the superiority of either the Western or Soviet Bloc political systems.

Dr. Sammy Lee of Huntington Beach, a Korean-American, won gold medals in diving at the 1948 London Games and 1952 Helsinki Games. The 1948 Games were the first in 12 years, with the 1940 and 1944 Games canceled because of World War II. At the time, citizens of Western nations often equated Asians with Japanese, enemies in World War II.

“In ’48 I tried to tell everybody I wasn’t Japanese,” Lee said.

By 1952, the Korean War was raging. Lee, by then a doctor in the U.S. military, received permission to leave his unit and compete in the Olympics.

“I had to explain to all the non-Iron Curtain judges that my family came from South Korea,” Lee said. “Of course, I never told the Iron [Curtain] bloc countries I was South Korean. I had both sides covered.”

Olympic athletes made for fine pawns in propaganda wars, sometimes unwittingly. Lee said he posed for a picture with some Russian athletes, simply as a gesture of friendship. The next day, he said, “there were headlines all over the world,” portraying him as a Communist sympathizer.

South Korean leader Syngman Rhee wrote to Lee before the 1952 Games, inviting him to compete on behalf of South Korea, a potential morale boost for a country at war. Lee declined, but he did return to his military unit in South Korea after the Games. One day, he said, he was summoned to the presidential palace to treat Rhee for an ear infection.

The two men had never met. As they talked, the South Korean strongman melted.

“He started to cry,” Lee said. “I was the son of one of his best friends.”

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Times staff writers Tim Brown, Chris Foster and Elliott Teaford contributed to this report.