Ahead of this year’s Paris Games, Donald Cohan and Jim Moroney, two athletes with Montgomery County ties, recalled the 1972 Munich Olympics and the attack on the Israeli team, writes Mike Sielski for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Moroney and Cohan were sailors on the 1972 U.S. Olympic Team.

Moroney, a Merion native and St. Joseph’s Prep graduate, attended the games around when he started his freshman year at Penn. When his team failed to make the finals, he spent the following two weeks enjoying his surroundings.

However, all joy was lost on Sept. 5 when he realized one of the apartment towers in the Olympic Village was the scene of a terrorist attack where two Israeli athletes were shot dead and nine more taken hostage.

Cohan, a Cheltenham High School alumnus, was not in Munich when the massacre happened. After returning on Sept. 6, he did not initially realize what had occurred. He tried to enter the locked-down village by scaling a fence and was met by two German soldiers pointing their weapons at him.

He yelled that he was an athlete and got a lesson in return.

“Do you realize how stupid you are?” said one of the soldiers. “I have orders to shoot anyone who’s trying to break into the village.”

Read more about the events at the 1972 Munich Olympics in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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