As security comes into focus for this year's Paris Games, here's a look at how three area Olympians learned about and coped with the terrorist siege against the Israeli team.
As security comes into focus for this year's Paris Games, here's a look at how three area Olympians learned about and coped with the terrorist siege against the Israeli team.
A Merion native, Moroney had no such lofty aspirations until his sophomore year at St. Joseph’s Prep. An injury prevented him from playing football, and Mike Vespoli, a math teacher at the Prep and its rowing coach, started bugging him to try rowing, knowing that Moroney had several friends already on the team. “I remember thinking, ‘This can’t be that tough,’ ” Moroney said by phone recently. Relatively speaking, it wasn’t.
“I was young, but I wasn’t stupid,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘These people are crazy. This isn’t a good place to be.’ Not that they would have opened fire, but you never know. Nothing was normal.” “The first thing we were told was, ‘Somebody got shot last night,’ ” Bantom said in a phone interview. “We were like, ‘What?’ There were no other details.”
Stacked with talent — Doug Collins, Tom Burleson, Tom McMillen, Dwight Jones — and having routed Japan by 66 points two days earlier in the preliminary round, the U.S. team was scheduled to hold two practices on Sept. 5. A bus would shuttle the coaches and players to and from a gym at a nearby army base; there, they could work out in private, once in the morning and once in the early evening.
The next day, during a memorial service held at the Olympic stadium and attended by 80,000 people — a memorial service for the slain Israeli athletes at which he never mentioned the slain Israeli athletes — Avery Brundage, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee, announced: “The Games will go on.” The U.S. men’s players’ reaction to Brundage’s declaration was unanimous: They wanted to go home.
“It weighed on us,” he said. “There was definitely a more somber mood to us after it happened. They were all young people who had nothing to do with what was going on in their country or what was going on in the world, and they paid the price.
“I’m 42, not a kid,” he said afterward. “I’ve only been in competitive racing for four-and-a-half years. I can’t believe all that’s happened so fast.”
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