END TIMES

The morning after my 1500-metre implosion, my one unspent emotion is relief — at the completion of the Olympic swimming program. And now I have four days of free time to savour it. I’m even comforted by the likelihood I’ll never attend another Games, because I’ve had enough of monastic routine, tiredness, boarding, and dereliction of school life; I’d once loved exams but had lately not bothered turning up. Olympic dorm life has been hilarious, but the inevitable prickly banter and relentless swagger probably didn’t help anyone’s racing. (How are dorm allocations made? I wonder. I’m the youngest in mine, but my age peers, Grub, Bubblehead, and Bobo, are together in a four-man dorm in some other building.)

Even had I actually wanted to go to another Olympics, the recent acceleration in global improvement might have other ideas: the nine-second drop in 400-metre times between Mexico and Munich will probably be repeated in Montreal. And I’ve already been so lucky for my career to peak in perfect synch with the quadrennial Olympic cycle. The Games are a graveyard for short but otherwise stellar careers labelled ‘counter-cyclical’, the great Karen Moras a prime example. In the three years after winning her Mexico Olympic 400-metre freestyle bronze as a rapidly rising fourteen-year-old, she broke the 400- and 800-metre freestyle world records, only to have become a spent force here in Munich.

In midafternoon the fallout from DeMont’s disqualification takes the worst possible turn (from my point of view) with news the IOC will declare the 400-metre gold medal void, leaving me with silver. But I’m hoping Australian officials are on the ball enough to at least protest, since it’s standard practice to advance all placegetters behind a disqualification. Further speculation seems pointless, so I brace myself and look forward to the plane home.

Within minutes of our rising the next day, all personal concerns go on hold when our usually laconic (though now plain tired) general manager, Roger Pegram, arrives unannounced to confine us indoors with the news, ‘There’s been a shooting in the Village’ — and that’s all he’ll say. None of us has a clue what this might mean, though the consensus is that some crazy Yank had a gun in his dorm and got into a fight over a girl. That’s my bet too, because I’ve seen how easily tempers can flare with even a mild dose of cabin fever from everyone being cooped up for so long. When Spiderman (one of the steadiest people you could meet) was putting in a bit of work with his new American girlfriend, ‘The Prairie Prowler’, he lost it momentarily when teammates kept opening his bedroom door to see how he was getting on. After a bit of shouting, with Spiderman and everyone jumping up and down in his doorway, it all soon settled, but I wonder what might have happened if there were a gun lying around. The closest we have to guns are the beautifully decorated knives everyone came back from town with yesterday — along with Bavarian kitsch like cuckoo clocks and fake watches. I watched those bedside blades nervously as arms waved and curses ripped, until everyone left Spiderman and The Prairie Prowler alone again.

At noon we’re let out none the wiser, though in a nearby billiards hall a Hong Kong swimmer is soon gushing about his team’s terrified pre-dawn corridor dash below an echoing volley of shots, and now I suspect the whole thing was just someone letting off steam by firing some ammo into the sky. I listen half-heartedly to his breathy yarn, noting only the phrase ‘We didn’t look back’, and by the time he and his teammates have been narrated to a safe-house, I’ve sunk the pink and blue, and am lining up the black.

A few hours later, now overhearing vague discussions of a still-unfolding drama behind that gunfire, I’m flabbergasted to learn the gold’s officially mine. But I find in the evening that not everyone is in a mood to smile on my good fortune. In a standing-room-only Olympic Village nightspot, the Canadian Ralph Hutton takes it a step further when he seems to challenge my moral custodianship of the medal. Six years my elder, twenty kilograms heavier, and several shouts drunker, he’s really wound up about something. ‘Yeah, sure, you’ll go home with your gold and not even mention DeMont,’ he steams. The rawness of his slur stuns me to silence, though I’m getting edgy: I’ve just watched his chin buck accusingly through a riot of horns and cymbals from the Who’s ‘Pictures of Lily’. But into this brew steps an Australian approximating Hutton’s heft, the ever-genial Neil Rogers, who calls, ‘Hey Ralph, Brad’s nothing like that!’ (Really? I ponder) before Hutton baulks at this uninvited feedback to pivot back to his lively circle like nothing’s happened. And Rogers is as incredulous as I am. ‘Did that really just fucken happen?’ he groans, both of us suddenly sputtering hysterically into our Lowenbraus.

Forgetting the face-off’s a cinch in such spirited surroundings, and I soon learn that the bee in Hutton’s bonnet likely came from his own past Olympic misfortune. He’d dived into his Mexico Olympic 400-metre final the latest world record smasher and hot favourite, only to be beaten by a winning time an entire three seconds slower than his mark — probably a victim of Mexico’s altitude challenges. The one consolation I can take from his diatribe is to better prepare myself for future conversations about the 400-metre.

When our dorm lift sways to an unexpectedly nauseating stop at the end of this high-flying night, I heave generously towards a gleaming semicircle of shoes before apologising profusely to the nimble-footed wearers. All three are in the blazers of stratospheric officialdom, and smile wryly at my condition.

Only the following morning do press photos of masked, Kalashnikov-toting terrorists glaring from balconies suggest the gravity of an apparent hostage crisis. Few of us have sufficient German to take much from the various radio updates, but officials reassure us by late morning that all danger has passed, the Black September terrorists having been captured or killed in an overnight airport fire-fight.

In the evening, still hungover and suddenly numbed by reports of the slaughter of eleven Israeli athletes in the Village itself, I’m receiving my gold medal on stage at a team celebration when I recognise my presenter’s blazer and Florsheims from the dorm lift the night before. And now I know his name and title: Australia’s chef de mission, Julius Patching.

As he loops the chain over my head, I’m not sure what to feel. It isn’t as if I expected the weight of an actual gold medal on my neck to instantly purge its recent symbolic burden, though it comes close. I’m also grateful that new gold medals can be struck so quickly, on news DeMont flew home with his. And now I remember those poor Israelis dying for their Olympic dreams.