The last anyone knew, one of those five was in the hands of a German Olympics official with Nazi ties. Today, five of the medals are actually missing. The IOC doesn’t even have all the medals. But he became even more agitated when The Athletic told him something neither Mahdavi nor anyone at the IOC had ever told him. In an interview last month, McMillen said he considers that last line from Mahdavi a cheap shot. “Everyone at the (IOC) appreciates your efforts to turn (into) something positive the impression that has been left by your declining of the award almost 50 years ago,” she added. There are “no legal grounds that would enable the International Olympic Committee to grant your request. “Please let me advise you that this would by no means respect the spirit of an award of Olympic medals,” wrote Mariam Mahdavi, the Olympic committee’s chief lawyer, in a letter dated Jan. The IOC got back to McMillen within a few months. In his letter to the IOC, McMillen wrote that “the team will not seek personal financial gain from this arrangement,” and instead “the team is seeking to accomplish something positive and a constructive alternative to leaving the medals permanently in a vault in Switzerland.” “Otherwise, (the ’72 team) is just kind of going to fade into the oblivion of history.” “Then you would have some kind of permanent memory of it in the United States,” McMillan told The Athletic. He asked that the 12 silver medals be shipped by the International Olympic Committee to attorney Donald “Taps” Gallagher in Chicago (so no player has to change his mind and vote to accept the medal), and Gallagher would donate them to the Naismith, Smithsonian and Olympic museums in America. This remains the only Olympic team in history to refuse a medal out of protest.īut it’s been 50 years now, and the mortality of the American 12 and what they did that night in Munich is weighing heavily on McMillen.
Two team members, Kenny Davis and Tommy Henderson, put it in their living wills that family members could not accept the medals after they die. They said no time and again when Olympic officials tried to get them to reconsider, in letters and over the phone. “We all agreed that it had to be unanimous about (accepting the) silver medal and that absolutely nobody wanted their medals,” Doug Collins said in a conversation with The Athletic last month, during which he laughed some, cried some and spoke with raw emotion all these years later. The players didn’t show up for the medal ceremony the next night after they’d lost an appeal lodged by the U.S. a chance to inbound the ball, throw a Hail Mary pass and eventually convert a go-ahead layup. The final score read 51-50 in favor of the Soviets, but only after officials twice put more time on the clock after the buzzers, giving the U.S.S.R. “That was the only way to express our feelings about the whole experience,” Jim Brewer said. They would never accept the silver medals. 10, 1972, in a cramped, dark locker room in Munich. He and his teammates sipped Jack Daniels samples at a distillery, cut into juicy red steaks and cackled over decades-old inside jokes, some dating to their grueling training camp on Pearl Harbor under legendary coach Hank Iba.Īnd in a hotel ballroom, they looked each other in the eyes and said they would hold firm on the protest they launched early in the morning of Sept.
congressman, McMillen recalls that reunion in the hills of Georgetown, Ky., as highly emotional and hot, with the humidity pumping sweat through sport coats in the sweltering August heat.
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