Ernst Huberty, the 95-year-old pioneer of the ARD sports show, welcomes four local Olympic champions to the evening studio on the middle Saturday of the Munich Games. However, they’ve had so much time to bask in their victory that Huberty wisely chooses to answer his own questions.
The “Bullenvierer”, as the boat from Lake Constance is called because of its power, prevented a West German debacle on the final day of the rowers on the regatta course, which was crowded with 40,000 spectators.
Stasi expands influence
Only the other four, the one without a helmsman, got something else, silver behind the GDR. The eight finished just fifth, well behind the surprise winners from New Zealand, where you needed a lottery win from one of the rowers to afford a competitive boat.
The GDR, on the other hand, wins medals with all seven boats, including three gold ones. In the victorious duo without Siegfried Brietzke, whom the Stasi, expanding their sphere of influence to include sport, recruited before the games as “IMS Charlie”, sits as a spy “to monitor competitive athletes who think differently”.
Stecher wins gold
Otherwise it will be a successful day for the GDR. Renate Stecher wins the 100 meters and, as instructed, changes the three stripes of the West shoes worn before the award ceremony for the two double stripes of VEB Spezialsportschuhe Hohenleuben.
Wolfgang Nordwig becomes the first non-American Olympic champion in pole vaulting, although he is helped by the fact that the Americans’ new carbon poles were banned shortly before the competition.
And Roland Matthes, who glides incomparably over the water, repeats the double victory from 1968 on both backstroke courses with gold over 200 meters. “We landed on the moon, we will reach Mars, and at some point we will also defeat Matthes,” says US coach Peter Daland. It was not until 1974 that Matthes, who became a swimmer in Thuringia as a child “because there was always a warm shower there”, lost a race after seven years.
But the West also has fun on this medal-rich Saturday. Halb Pfarrkirchen is in Munich to cheer on Konrad Wirnhier in skeet shooting. When the last clay pigeon bursts, the fans lift the master gunsmith from Lower Bavaria onto their shoulders.
David Wottle, the man with the hat he wears for the US anthem, invents the craziest winning strategy there can be in an 800-meter dash: last after one lap, first after two. And John Akii-Bua, the natural phenomenon from Uganda, after his sensational victory over the 400 meter hurdles, invents something completely new at the Olympics with an original joy that infects an entire stadium: the lap of honour.
