Not many sports officials play leading roles in award-winning films, Walther Tröger made it, albeit involuntarily: in the Oscar-winning documentary “A Day in September”, which illuminates the assassination attempt at the 1972 Games in Munich. Tröger was mayor of the Olympic village at the time, Palestinian terrorists had attacked the Israeli team there and on the morning of September 5 had already killed two athletes. “The Olympic Games are reduced to utter silence”, one hears the American news anchor say in the film, while the world follows live how Interior Minister Genscher, the Munich police chief Schreiber and Tröger try to stop the catastrophe. When the terrorists refuse to allow the police chief to speak to the Israeli hostages, Tröger declares himself ready to shoulder this monumental task: finding words while everything around him freezes in silence.
More than half of Tröger’s life was characterized by the rings. From 1989 to 2009 he was a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), General Secretary of the German NOK since 1961, its President from 1992 to 2002, before the NOK merged with the German Sports Confederation four years later to form the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB). Tröger, said its president Alfons Hörmann now, “devoted his entire life to the service of sport and the Olympic movement and always actively lived the values of sport”. He experienced 27 Olympic Games, was delegation leader eight times, the most formative of course were those in Munich in 1972. That was when he became a figure in contemporary history.
Tröger often told how he wrestled with the hostage takers for ultimatums, sometimes understanding, sometimes pleading, always carried by the almost naive hope of stopping something inevitable. During the rescue attempt at Fürstenfeldbruck airport, six hostage-takers and nine athletes were later killed, the pressure was great to cancel the games, but IOC boss Avery Brundage and Tröger resisted it. A decision he never regretted, as Tröger told SZ a few years ago. At that time, friends from Israel “came to me on behalf of the team and said: ‘Please try to convince everyone that the games must go on.'” Just don’t give in to the terrorists, not even at the worst of the hour.
Tröger was always the opposite of Thomas Bach: polarizing, mostly fighting with an open visor
A life in the service of sport and its values, that sounds dusty at first and also a little wrong in this cool commercial industry. But Tröger, a former basketball player born in Wunsiedel in Bavaria, was accepted. The athletes and the sport should take center stage, he thought, they should not serve as a ski jump for one’s own ambitions, as Tröger often experienced at Olympus. When Tröger was voted out of office as NOK boss in 2002, which in fact amounted to his disempowerment, he rumbled that the coup had been “prepared well in advance” – by Thomas Bach alone, “who has been fighting me for ten years”. Soon Tröger prophesied that the aspiring functionary from Tauberbischofsheim was just in the fast lane: towards the IOC throne. He was right.
Tröger was always the opposite of Bach, who served himself highly in the system and embodies it like no other to this day. Instead of fisting in the back room, Tröger polarized on the front stage. He criticized commercialization and gigantism in the Olympic movement, but he also rumbled against athletes who wanted to position themselves at the 2008 China Games against the hosts’ Tibet policy. He followed the sport-political events to the end; he always found many words, for example criticizing the IOC’s waxy ban on Russian state doping; He really wanted to experience the 2020 Games in Tokyo, on site, of course. He might have made it if the pandemic hadn’t blown the event into this summer.
Walther Tröger died last Wednesday at the age of 91.
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