The massacre at the Munich Olympics—the kidnapping and murder of Jewish athletes by Palestinian commandos on German soil—was the most brutal event in the modern history of sport. But there was more to the 1972 Olympics than the massacre. There were, for example, the sports. In contrast to the very fine, German-focused cultural history by Kay Schiller and Chris Young (The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany [2010]), David Large's book devotes considerable space to athletes—and to Americans. For Large, the athletic competition and the terror, though not inevitably paired, were organically linked. Both were extensions of a single, “intensely political” proposition: bringing together “the youth of the world” in staged festivity—which meant turning “this comfortable Bavarian town into a seething cockpit of world events” (5). Large thus tries to situate these Games within longer trend lines in international sports.

Writing for a crossover audience, Large traces the origins and pursuit of Munich's Olympic bid in the triple contexts of West German politics, East-West sporting relations, and the idiosyncratic gentleman's club known as the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Large keeps a critical distance from the larger-than-life figures at the core of his story: charismatic chief organizer Willi Daume; can-do Mayor Hans-Jochen Vogel (SPD); visionary designer Otl Aicher; fallen-saintly Chancellor Willy Brandt, whose leadership deficits during the hostage crisis Large rightly decries; and the high priest of Olympism, the IOC's aging president, Avery Brundage. Large skillfully covers planning, building, financing, artistic conceits, worldwide glad-handing, local prostituting, and security. Noting that “mending fences” with the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was “central to [Daume's] Olympic diplomacy” (133), Large registers Daume's embrace of Brandt's Ostpolitik, as well as the GDR's ironically exacerbated anxieties and intransigence in Sportpolitik. Large also covers the organizers’ efforts to ingratiate themselves with the Third World, particularly with Africans—and how those efforts were nearly brought to naught by a landmark crisis over admitting a team from the white-ruled, breakaway British colony of Rhodesia. The author then takes us through the actual Games, whose much praised Opening Ceremony he calls “a tour de force of kitschy cliché” (148). The alliterative thick description that follows is Large at his best.

Along the way, Large makes good several deficits. Despite the cravenness with which Arab governments added insult to injury after the massacre, Schiller and Young cold-bloodedly contend that Bonn should have ignored “the clamoring of [West German] public opinion” (211) and redoubled its pre-massacre effort “to right its relations with the Arab world” (217). But West German bungling had helped cost Israeli athletes their lives, and Bonn later traded the murderers for another round of hostages. Large notes the “tone deafness” (210, 303) that plagued the German authorities through much of what happened. He also rejects the notion that Brandt “obviously had to refuse” (Schiller and Young, 207) help from Israel's special antiterrorist unit while explaining why Brandt did refuse. And whereas Schiller and Young's chapter on the terrorist attack comes last in their book and is titled “The End of the Games,” Large stays true to the controversial reality: an additional chapter follows, titled “The Games Go On.”

Large employs Munich's legendary athletic performances and disappointments to touch on bigger themes. He reminds us that “games” were not a stress-releasing form of identity politics, but their grim proving ground. Moreover, this proving ground ran both East-West and North-South. Most American readers will be surprised to learn that the infamous post-massacre, Soviet-American gold-medal basketball fiasco—when the trailing Soviets were somehow given three extra chances to “win” a game in which time had supposedly expired—was not even “the most violently contested” (272) outcome: in field hockey, perennial champion Pakistan's controversial defeat in the gold-medal match at the hands of host West Germany led visiting players and fans to assault officials and ransack the facilities.

While taking athletes seriously, Large nevertheless concludes appropriately that “the Olympics were not chiefly about them in the first place” (286). He summarizes well how Munich seemed to bring to a point all the tendencies that had weighed on the modern Olympics, from commercialism and professionalism to doping, exorbitant building costs, boycott threats, the perennial primacy of politics, and security dilemmas. Less effective is his rambling effort to contextualize the Olympic massacre in the longer histories of the Arab-Israeli conflict, national and international counterterrorism, the treatment of foreign workers, and memorialization. With respect to the latter, Large too readily accepts Gavriel Rosenfeld's “shrewd” (90) claim that the price for Munich's “innovative and spectacular Olympic architecture” (288) was a “declining consciousness of the Nazi past” (Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory [2000], 156). By contrast, Schiller and Young think the architecture, design, and landscaping “produced a sophisticatedly constructed site of reflection and self-reflection” (125). Yet, the very effort to erase and to replace—in this case via the conscious production of an alternative to the Nazi-hosted Olympics of 1936—catalyzed a lively and constructive bout of public memory-processing (see Noel Cary, “Memory Games,” in Constructions of Conflict, ed. Katharina Hall and Kathryn Jones [2011], 135–58). Large rightly remarks on the mutual skepticism (or aversion) that existed between the New Left and the Daume/Vogel economic and cultural modernizers. Still, Munich captured both the resurgent energy of West Germany in the late 1960s and the naiveté of a moment in which limits seemed to have vanished. The moment proved fleeting, and Munich captured that, too. Linked, as it was, to the Middle Eastern causes of the imminent oil shocks, Munich became an unwitting “farewell party” for the “long 1960s” (Schiller and Young, 223–25).

In the end, Large avoids drawing the conceptual balance sheet expressed in the book's subtitle: “Tragedy, Terror, and Triumph.” How “triumph” fits as the tail of this terminological troika remains elusive. In part, this problem is inherent in a situation where the ethos of athleticism—so vigorously on display in Munich thanks to athletes Olga Korbut and Mark Spitz—fell victim to the cruelest of political realities. Still, to conclude a book that is in other ways so satisfying, something more than the book's final sentence seems necessary: “This epochal moment in the history of Germany and the world … is highly unlikely ever to become a convenient fable” (318).