The gold medal winner from 1972 on bomb threats, smoking and experiences of Munich
“He warned that if I came home to Belfast I’d be shot and my flat would be bombed,” Mary Peters says of the anonymous man who threatened to kill her after she won gold in the pentathlon at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. The call was made just before, at those same Olympics, the Palestinian group Black September killed two members of the Israeli team and took nine hostages. Seventeen people eventually lost their lives in that terrorist attack.
The police took the warning so seriously that special branch security officers shadowed Peters, who was oblivious to their presence, on her flight home and all through her celebratory return to Belfast. “They brought me down Royal Avenue in an open-topped lorry,” she says of the welcoming committee. “There was ticker tape coming out of the windows and, at the lord mayor’s reception at the top of the road, I said: ‘I went for gold, I won gold and I brought it home for you.
“It’s ridiculous and I don’t like children to read that. A doctor said to me once: ‘Imagine if you didn’t smoke. How good could you really have been?’ I said: ‘I couldn’t be better than gold.’ But almost everyone on the team smoked back then. We all used to race to duty-free to get our bottles and our cigarettes. But I quit smoking in 1974 because I was collecting money to build this track and I didn’t want anybody to see me smoking. I’m really glad I stopped.
“I saw the solider, the ambulances and the police all outside. It wasn’t until the following morning and I turned on the news that I heard what actually happened. I was going to work and the television cameras were outside. I knew they had filmed me coming out of my front door and crossing the road. But I happened to know the controller of the BBC and rang him and said: ‘Please, don’t let me be seen coming out of the house because somebody might believe I’m implicated in some way.
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