The NeverEnding Story
The German author, Michael Ende, was a
little unconventional when he published a fantasy novel in 1979 which covers
the adventures of a boy, Bastian Balthazar Bux. In this novel, Bastian, discovers
and reads a book entitled, “The NeverEnding Story”. This fictional story that Bastian reads is
set in the magical land of “Fantastica” and this novel was later adapted into
several films. The first film in the series adapted only the first half of the
book and consequently did not convey the message of the title as it was
portrayed in the novel. The second half of the book was subsequently used as a
rough basis for the sequel. The third film, “The NeverEnding Story III: Escape
from Fantasia”, first screened in 1994, has an original plot which was not based on
the book.
But what if there was another
“never-ending” story? What if the alternative was a non-fictional account of a
sequence of events that have unfolded over the past fifty years and which will
continue to unravel for many eons to come?
Surprisingly, there is such a story,
and unlike the creation of the Multiverse, which, according to some, may have
originated through divine intervention, this story has been solely created and
produced by humankind. To get us
started, we need to turn the clocks back to the summer of 1972.
Then starts a part of this story. A story that may continue for more than a billion years. A NeverEnding Story that is not fantasy.
The Munich Summer Olympics (1972)
No Malaysian soccer fan will ever forget the 1972 Olympics. Our soccer team had successfully qualified for the Munich Games as one of the representatives from the Asian continent. This was the first time our soccer team had made the grade and it would be the only time to-date that a Malaysian soccer team would actually participate as Olympians at a game that is domestically extremely popular (the team also qualified for the event in 1980 but chose not to participate in the Moscow Games as a reaction to the military invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR).
At the games in Munich in 1972, Malaysia was placed in a preliminary group comprising Germany, Morocco and the United States of America.
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A series of stamps issued in 1972 celebrating the XXth Olympics held in Munich |
On the 27th August 1972, Malaysia
played the host country, West Germany, in front of 60,000 partisan home fans.
There was to be no giant killing act that day and a 3-0 score-line, in favour
of home nation, rightly recorded the overall difference between the two teams
on the pitch.
Two days later, the Malaysians faced
the United States of America (USA). This time, the Malaysians returned a 3-0
victory and for a few days, Malaysian heads were held high.
Then followed the crunch game. Played
on the 31st of August, the Malaysian team succumbed to a 6-0 defeat against
Morocco. The dream may have been quickly over for the followers of Malaysian
soccer, but the memory has never faded.
The Malaysian victory over the USA at
soccer did not raise many eyebrows in American homes, schools, colleges,
workplaces, restaurants and bars. This was only an emerging sport in the USA at
the time, but when basketball is the topic and the USSR is the opponent, American
interest and conversation assume a different level of intensity altogether.
The 1972 Olympics men’s basketball
final has been categorised as one of the most dramatic events in the
history of the Olympics. This match recorded the first ever loss for the
USA team since the game became an Olympic sport at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Until that memorable final, the USA team had chalked up sixty-three straight
wins building an Olympic pedigree, on the basketball court, that was second to
none.
Then came the Munich final between two
teams, the USA and the USSR, that had each won their first eight games of the
tournament. The rivalry between these two nations spanned many battlefronts
over several of the past decades. I have recorded some of this rivalry of the
“Cold War” in previous posts but suffice to say that political confrontation
and military tensions between the Soviet Union and United States extended from
space to the sports arena. The Soviet Union had achieved many space-related
firsts before Munich, but the Americans had beaten the Soviet Union to a prestigious,
crewed landing on the Moon.
Indeed, by the onset of the Munich
Olympics, the United States had already made five successful crewed Moon
landings, with the latter Apollo missions (from Apollo 15, in July 1971)
delivering motorized vehicles to the surface of the Moon, thus allowing the
visiting lunar explorers the flexibility of making even longer excursions away
from their landing site.
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The Lunar Rover had already made several excursions to the Moon by the time the Munich Olympics were held |
The Olympics represents the most
premier of international sporting events. For the Soviets to use the stage of
Munich to beat a nemesis in a sport that they had dominated since its
introduction as an Olympic event, i.e. basketball, for the ultimate prize of an
Olympic gold medal, would be a major coup.
It should be noted that at the time,
the Olympics strictly prohibited any involvement of professional athletes.
The Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries used this rule to
their advantage, listing all their top sportsmen as soldiers or state employees,
thus circumventing the rules permitting only amateur participation at the
Olympics. On the other hand, leading American players were unable to play in
the Olympics as they were officially professional and played in National
Basketball Association (NBA) matches. That disadvantage had not prevented the
Americans from winning the first seven Olympic basketball tournaments without a
single defeat.
The Munich Olympics: A Controversial Basketball Final
A game of basketball, at the Olympics,
normally comprises four quarters, each of ten minutes duration. It was around
midnight, local time, on the 10th of September 1972 and on the basketball court
in Munich, the Soviet team donned red and the US team wore box-fresh white. With
six minutes of a forty-minute game left on the clock, the Soviets held a
ten-point lead. But then the Americans,
led by Kevin Joyce, began, finally, to fast-press and hustle and so commenced a
Hollywood style comeback. Slowly but
surely, the gap reduced, until, with less than 10 seconds remaining, the
Soviets led by just one point, 49-48, although they had possession.
With seven seconds to play, American
player, Doug Collins, stole Alexander Belov’s cross-court pass at half
court and was subsequently fouled by another Soviet player as he drove
towards his red-shirted opponent’s basket. As a result, with three seconds
remaining on the game clock, the match was halted by the lead referee. Collins was
awarded two free throws. He sank the
first to tie the score at 49 all. Just as Collins lifted the ball to begin his
shooting motion in attempting the second free throw, the horn from the scorer's
table sounded, triggering a chain of events that left the game's final three
seconds mired in controversy. Whilst lead referee, Renato Righetto,
turned away from the free throw attempt upon hearing the horn, he failed to stop play and Collins continued
with his shooting motion, converting his second free throw to put the U.S.
ahead by a score of 50–49. Gold medal to Team USA or was this to be the case?
There has been much analysis of what
happened next but suffice to say that the reason for the horn sounding at that
juncture was unclear. Amidst much debate, repeated interruption and
controversy, the final three seconds were replayed no less than three times!
At the end of the third replay, the
Soviets scored with the ball going through the American basket just as the horn
blew, this time signifying the end of the match. Wild scenes of celebrations
erupted amongst Soviet players and supporters from Munich to Moscow. On the
other hand, American emotions run high, till this day.
At the Munich basketball arena, the
Americans quickly appealed. Their key point: the game had lasted forty minutes and three
seconds. And in those additional three seconds, a gold medal award was snatched
and redirected from North America to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the jury
was loaded: of the five judges on it, three were from countries aligned to the
Soviet Communist regime. The representatives from Cuba, Poland and the Soviet
Union all voted in favour of the Soviet Union, and the USA appeal was rejected by
three votes to two.
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Team USA competing in basketball. Stamps issued by Ajman, one of the Emirates of the United Arab Emirates. |
Team USA had two alternatives: accept the
decision by receiving the silver or boycott the medal ceremony. They chose the latter, and for the first time
in Olympic history, a spot on the podium was left vacant with a set of medals
unclaimed.
Nearly fifty years on, those medals
remain in a Swiss vault. In-fact, Ken Davis, the captain of Team USA, has taken
steps to ensure they will stay in Switzerland in perpetuity. Article IX of his last
will and testament states, “I devise and bequeath at my death that my wife,
Rita, and children Jill and Bryan never accept a silver medal from the 1972
Games in West Germany”.
As had ended the Malaysian Munich
Olympic soccer dream, so had concluded American basketball
hopes - an incomprehensible nightmare that had taken place in waking hours.
But these were not the worst of the nightmares of Munich.
The Munich Massacre
Sadly, what was to follow would only
cloud Munich under a pall of grief and sadness, spiked with sentiments of anger
and outrage, hitherto unseen at an international sporting event.
For more than a week, the Games
unfolded without incident. Then, at 4:30 am on the 5th of September 1972,
eight Palestinian militants, affiliated with the Black September
terrorist group, scaled a fence surrounding the Olympic Village. Disguised as
athletes and using stolen keys, they forced their way into the quarters of the
Israeli Olympic Team. There, they killed an Israeli wrestling coach and a
weightlifter. Another nine Israeli athletes and coaches were taken hostage.
The terrorists group demanded the
liberation of more than 200 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and the
release of other notorious radicals from German incarceration in exchange for
the release of the Israeli hostages. They also asked for an aircraft to fly
them to a safe destination in the Middle East.
At about 10:00 pm the same day, believing
they had reached an agreement, the terrorists led their bound and blindfolded
hostages from their quarters into buses that transported them to waiting
helicopters. The helicopters carried them to Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base, 25 kilometres
west of the Olympic Village. At the Air Base, police were lying in ambush with
a rescue plan apparently in place.
Suffice to say that the entire rescue
operation was a catastrophic failure in both planning and execution. Every one
of the Israeli hostages and one police officer were killed. Five terrorists
also lost their lives. Three of the Palestinian gunmen were captured.
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Guyana honoured all the Israeli representatives killed at Munich the Munich Olympics with this series of the stamps |
For the first time in history,
the Olympic Games were suspended for 24 hours as a tribute to the murdered
athletes. The site of the Cheerful Games had become a terrorist target. Once
again, dreams were shattered, this time with the cost of many human lives.
The
Munich Olympics: The Missing American 100 Meter Sprinters
To be hailed as the fastest human in the world is the accolade given to the winner of the men’s 100 metres sprint event at the Olympics. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, the heats and finals of this prestigious athletics event were held on 31 August and 1 September. Eighty-five athletes from fifty-five nations competed in this event and each nation was limited to three athletes per the rules in force since the 1930 Olympic Congress.
This event is memorable for the
absence of favourites and then world record holders Eddie Hart and Rey Robinson
from their quarterfinal heats. American
sprint coach, Stan Wright, was (somehow) provided with an outdated schedule
which stated incorrect starting times for the heats involving his athletes. Instead
of being at the stadium securing their places in the semi-finals, the three qualified American athletes, Robinson,
Hart and Robert Taylor, were instead at the American Broadcasting
Company’s television station in Munich watching what they believed were replays
of their morning, preliminary races.
At the eleventh hour, they were
informed that they were watching live coverage of the races they were scheduled
to run in. The athletes rushed to the stadium, but Hart and Robinson, scheduled
in the first two races, missed their heats. Taylor had to hurriedly take off his warm-up
attire before running his heat. Once again, an appeal by American officials to
have Robinson and Hart run in another heat, was rejected.
The event was won by Valeriy
Borzov of the Soviet Union, the first medal in the men's 100 metres Olympic
event for that nation. The silver was won by Robert Taylor, the American who
had just made it to the starting block on time for his heat.
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Valeriy Borzov featured on this stamp from the Republic of Equatorial Guinea |
In the years that followed, this turn
of events would have almost eternal consequences but once again, the hopes and
dreams of a potential American champion were devasted by an unusual set of
circumstances.
Voyager
1 & 2
In 1964, long before the flame signifying the start of the Munich Olympics was lit, Gary Flandro, an aerospace engineer working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the leading American centre for the robotic exploration of the Solar System, was assigned the task of studying techniques for exploring the outer planets of the Solar System. Through his investigations he discovered that a rare alignment of the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), was scheduled to occur in the late 1970s. This type of alignment occurs only once every 175 years and this was clearly an opportunity too great to be missed. Thus, was conceived the concept of the “Planetary Grand Tour”, a multi-planet mission utilizing the “gravity-assist” technique, in which gravitational forces of one planet would be used to slingshot an orbiting spacecraft into a new trajectory towards another object. The specific alignment that was projected to occur in the late 1970s could reduce the overall journey duration of the Planetary Grand Tour from forty years to less than ten years.
Gary Flandro’s work on the Planetary
Grand Tour was exploited by NASA and became the core of the Voyager 1 and
Voyager 2 missions which were launched in 1977.
Voyager 2 was the first to be launched
in August, 1977. Its trajectory was designed to allow flybys of Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Voyager 1 was launched a few weeks after Voyager
2, but along a shorter and faster trajectory that was designed to provide an
optimal flyby of Saturn's moon. Titan.
The accomplishments of the Voyager
missions over the decades are almost legendary. Between 1977 and 1990, these twin
spacecraft made many discoveries and achieved many firsts. Some of the distinctions
achieved:
- ·
First spacecraft to fly by all four planets of
the outer solar system (Voyager 2)
- ·
First mission to discover 24 new moons of the
four outer planets (both spacecraft)
- ·
First spacecraft to fly by four different
target planets (Voyager 2)
- ·
First spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune
(Voyager 2)
- ·
First spacecraft to image the rings of
Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune (Voyager 2)
- ·
First spacecraft to discover active volcanoes
beyond Earth (on Jupiter’s moon Io — Voyager 1)
- ·
First spacecraft to detect lightning on a
planet other than Earth (at Jupiter — Voyager 1)
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Voyager 1: A series of stamps from the Republic of Central Africa celebrating the many achievements. |
After Voyager 1 departed from Saturn
in November 1980, it began a journey into an area where no human-made object
had ever gone before: the space between the stars. On August 25, 2012, it
crossed over into interstellar space, leaving behind the heliosphere — the
enormous magnetic bubble encompassing our Sun, the planets of the Solar System and
the solar wind.
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A series of stamps from the Caribbean island of Nevis commemorating the many achievements of Voyager 1 |
Voyager 2 set course for interstellar
space after departing from Neptune in August 1989, and followed Voyager 1 into the
interstellar medium on November 5, 2018,
Today (30 April 2021), after a journey
of more than 43 years, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are at a distance of 14.19
billion miles and 11.79 billion miles from the Sun respectively. Each is travelling
away from Earth at approximately thirty-five thousand miles per hour. If a
torchlight was switched on at Voyager 1,
the electromagnetic waves from that light source of the torch would take about
21 hours to reach us (One-way Light Time: contrast that to the time of eight
minutes being the duration it takes for the light of our Sun to travel 93
million miles and reach Earth). Even more amazingly, NASA keeps in
communication with the two interstellar robotic explorers through its Deep
Space Network.
The Adventures of Earth's Robotic Interstellar Ambassadors
Even when traveling at 35,000 mph, the Voyager probes will need another 300 years just to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud (first described in 1950 by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort as a theoretical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals proposed to surround the Sun and the Solar System). The Oort Cloud is thought to be the birthplace of the long period comets that sometimes make forays into the orbits of the inner planets. The outer edge of the Oort Cloud could be so distant from its inner edge that is estimated that it would take the Voyager probes about 20,000 - 30,000 years or even more, to completely traverse it.
About 10,000 years after it exits the outer edge of the Oort Cloud (about 40,000 years from now), Voyager 1 could finally approach an alien star, specifically a red dwarf, called Ross 248.
Its twin, Voyager 2, however, will need about 300,000 years before
it comes close to bathing in the light of another star.
Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Man!
During the Munich Olympics, the morale
of global sport participants and followers was oscillating like a pendulum
clock invented by Christiaan Huygens himself. The Americans had finally been
dethroned in basketball. The world record holders were “no-shows” in the 100
meters sprint glamour event for men. Then, there was the massacre of the
Israeli athletes and coaches.
The world needed a boost. The Olympics
needed a hero. Someone who would restore American pride and help anesthetize
Jewish pain, rage and hurt.
And cometh the hour, indeed, did cometh
the man!
Mark Spitz
American swimmer, Mark Andrew Spitz, arrived in Munich
after having failed to deliver in the previous Olympics, held in Mexico. He had
gone to Mexico promising to deliver six gold medals. He returned with two, both
won in team, relay events.
The American Jew came to Munich with
the same goal. Six gold medals.
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A stamp from the Republic of Guinea honouring American swimming icon, Mark Spitz |
Mark Spitz did not win six golds. He
won seven! And Spitz won each of those gold medals with a new world record. His
record of winning seven gold medals at a single Olympics stood for thirty-six
years, until 2008, when it was surpassed by fellow American Michael
Phelps, who won eight golds at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
All of America cheered his victories.
And the sobs of sadness heard in some Jewish homes were slowly replaced by tears
of joy.
The Golden Records
Mark Spitz broke records in the
swimming pool and in the years to come, Voyager 1 and 2 would break many more
records. So why do I blend the stories of the transformative scientific and
engineering achievements of the Voyager Twins amongst some of the most unforgettable
memories of the Munich Olympics.
I link these stories because there is
a connection. A connection of eternal romance. Each of the Voyager Twins carries a time
capsule – a “Golden Record”. The contents of the Golden Record were selected
for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, et. al.
Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural
sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other
animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and
eras, together with the spoken greetings from the inhabitants of Earth in
fifty-five languages. They also included printed messages from American
President, Jimmy Carter, and United Nations Secretary General, Kurt
Waldheim.
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A series of stamps from Ghana commemorating the 30th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 2. On the second row on the left, a photograph of one of the Golden Records can be seen. It should be remembered that in the mid 1970s, CDs and DVDs had not been invented yet and this phonograph records were used for information storage. |
The Voyager’s phonograph records, built to last at least a billion years in space are intended to provide a snapshot of life and culture on Earth, should the spacecraft ever come into contact in the future with other alien space travelers.
- ·
Valeriy Borzov (USSR – 1st)
- ·
Robert Taylor (USA (who just made it to the
starting block in time for his heat) – 2nd)
- ·
Lennox Miller (Jamaica – 3rd)
- ·
Aleksandr Kornelyuk (USSR – 4th).
What started out as an Olympic sprint
event for these sportsmen of the Munich Olympics has become a part of an interstellar space marathon to the stars.
The Munich Olympics was not the
Cheerful Games that was intended but like all happy endings to bedtime stories,
we recall the strength of spirit of Mark Spitz.
As for Eddie Hart, the world record
holder in the men’s 100 meters who had not get to his heat on time, he ran the
final leg for Team USA in the 4 X 100 meters relay. His team won the gold medal
in a world record time of 38.19 seconds.
As Eddie Hart approached the race finish line, he sneaked a peep to his right, to see
Valeriy Borzov, just behind him. He knew then that he would return to America with at
least one gold medal to his name.
Good night!
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The photograph, captured at the finish line of the 100 meter sprint of the 1972 Munich Olympics that became part of an interstellar space marathon as part of a dataset stored on the Golden Records of the Voyagers |
All stamps displayed above are from my personal collection.
