Wim Ruska! We almost forgot about him, but he deserves a better fate. After all the articles and impressive TV documentaries – especially those by Twan Huys about Ankie Spitzer – about the hostage drama of the Munich Olympics in 1972, I was still surprised by an article by Jaap Visser about Ruska in The watchword.
Ruska (1940 – 2015) was an Amsterdam judoka who won two gold medals at those Games. A magnificent achievement, but while Anton Geesink had achieved lifelong fame eight years earlier with Olympic gold, Ruska disappeared into obscurity. He had become Olympic champion at the wrong time. A biography about him was published in 2011, but who was still interested in him?
In Het Parool, son Michael talks about his father. How strict and tough he could be (“I’ve had some serious blows from him”) and how misunderstood he felt, but that misjudgment was also due to his uneasy dealings with the press.
The article reminded me that I had been in the same Olympic boat as Ruska. As a young journalist in a reporting team for major provincial newspapers, I had witnessed and described Ruska’s triumph at close quarters. Like Ruska, I had stayed in Munich after the dramatic hostage-taking that killed 11 Israeli athletes. In my memory, all journalists stayed then, including those, like me, who felt that the Games should be ended immediately after the massacre.
Journalists should always stay, they think, because who else should report the facts? There is a lot in that, but something still gnaws when you read what happened to Ruska after those Games. He was ‘cancelled’, you might say, by society. After his return he received no reception at Schiphol and no tribute in his city, Amsterdam. Only months later could a municipal award be issued.
Although only a handful of Dutch participants left the Games, Ruska received the full brunt of social contempt for staying. He never got over that. He became a judo coach, bouncer at the Red Light District and started a gym, but everything seemed to fail. In those years I called him one more time asking for an interview, but he curtly refused.
For the journalists who had remained in Munich, in retrospect there was little reason for satisfaction. Yes, they were supposed to “state the facts,” but which ones? Only the sporting facts, the Ruska facts, because the facts of the terrorist attack were covered up by the authorities. It was one big exercise in journalistic powerlessness in Munich. Lots of press conferences, no facts. The true facts went under the German cover because there had been a lot of blundering by the authorities and the police.
Ankie Spitzer, widow of the murdered Israeli participant André Spitzer, told in Huys’s documentary that she had to wait fifty years before she was given access to the German files. Only then did it become clear to her how and by whom her husband had been killed. Compared to her, Ruska could still count himself lucky with his gold medals, but after Munich there was also mainly bitterness for him. Munich ’72 only had losers.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 14, 2022