Mark Spitz

The day after Spitz's heroics was even more memorable than the days that preceded it. Early on the morning of September 5, eight Palestinian terrorists invaded the Israeli team headquarters in the Olympic Village, killing two Israeli athletes. Nine Israeli athletes were taken hostage. The terrorists, known as Black September, demanded the release of political prisoners. As the world watched the standoff on live television, German authorities took the terrorists and their prisoners to an airfield for a flight out of the country. But later in the day, a German police rescue attempt failed, ending in the killing of all nine hostages.

By 11:30 that morning, a security detail surrounded Spitz, who, as an American Jew, was considered a potential terrorist target. The plans for him to attend various winners' ceremonies throughout Germany were suddenly and secretly changed. "I completely freaked out," he told Phillip Whitten of Swim Info. "Here it was, twenty-seven years after the end of World War II, and there were still madmen killing Jews because they are Jews." Surrounded by six armed guards, Spitz was taken to London for a photo shoot to which he had committed with a German magazine, and then flown home to California, where he expected to begin dental school.

When he finally arrived home that Wednesday morning, he watched the Olympic memorial service on television with his two sisters. "The whole thing took on a surreal quality," he told Whitten. "I was in Sacramento, sitting in my living room like Johnny Lunchbucket, watching the Olympics on TV, as if I had never been there.… A few days later I was in temple for a Rosh Hashanah service, sitting next to Governor [Ronald] Reagan. That's when the significance of the whole sequence of events really hit me."