In August 1972, seven Irish bicyclists and a trio of support staff inconspicuously arrived at the Belgian harbour of Ostend, approximately a week prior to the inauguration of the Olympic Games. While it was anticipated that vehicles would fetch them and convey them to Munich, their destination remained a clandestine location in the metropolis. Amongst those journeying to Germany, not a single individual was officially a part of the Irish squad. The four athletes – Noel Teggart, Peter Doyle, Liam Horner, and Kieron McQuaid had been picked to participate in the Olympics that year.
However, the septet in Ostend had arrived with a different intent – to create chaos and interruption during the road race at the most prominent sports event globally, the Olympics. John Mangan from Killorglin, a notable and highly accomplished cyclist of his era, was amongst the disrupters. As per an RTÉ radio documentary, broadcasted in 2020, titled “Green and Gold,” the journey to Munich via cars lasted over a day, culminating in the cyclists’ drop-off at a residence in the city located at 49 Implerstrasse.
The cyclists maintained a low profile as they continued training until the 6th of September, the day of the road race’s commencement. Mangan recollected arriving a day prior to the Olympics commencement, settling in a house that Eddie Rafter had coordinated. Additionally, he mentioned that none of the participants had carried the residence’s address, ensuring their location could not be traced.
The alternates symbolized the opposing divide in Irish cycling’s ongoing dispute, a conflict that had previously made its way to the Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956, a year memorable for Ireland due to Ronnie Delany’s gold medal in the 1500m race. Paudie Fitzgerald, Tom Gerrard, and Tom Flanagan made global news during these games after their arrest for gatecrashing the road race. The hostility carried forward sixteen years later to Munich, further underscored by the unrelenting friction in sports politics.
After the establishment of the Irish State, the world of cycling was divided into three contentious groups, each vying for dominance. This included two bodies acknowledged on an international level and another, the National Cycling Association (NCA). The NCA was a body constituted by members from throughout Ireland but lacked global recognition.
Those selected to officially represent Ireland at the Munich event were from the Irish Cycling Federation (ICF), an organisation of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and the Northern Irish Cycling Federation (NICF), an entity with members exclusively from Northern Ireland.
The unauthorised group that had covertly reached Munich were all affiliates of the NCA. Their strategy was straightforward: create disruption at the low-security event, incite pandemonium, get probable apprehension from the law, and stir up a news storm about their predicament and the British involvement in Irish matters.
The mood in Northern Ireland was tense and precarious during that period. Earlier that year, during a protest march in Derry’s Bogside locality, British paratroopers had shot 26 unarmed civil demonstrators. This tragic event, known as Bloody Sunday, resulted in the immediate death of 13 people, six of whom were only 17 years old, and one person succumbing to their injuries four months later.
The year 1972 went on to witness unprecedented heights of violence, being deemed the most brutal year of the Troubles.
In retaliation to the Derry tragedy, a mob stormed the British embassy in Dublin on February 2nd. What was supposed to be a day of grieving for the casualties turned into an outburst of fury, and the embassy was set ablaze. Mangan, a participant in the Dublin rally, witnessed Merrion Square’s building’s destruction.
Further, the arrival of the NCA members happened to coincide with West Germany’s shifting stance towards the Olympic Games. In that year, they had decided to project a less severe image, distancing themselves from the worldwide impression left after the 1936 Olympics, tainted by the ascension of Hitler’s Nazi regime. Thus, the theme for the 1972 Munich event was “Heitere Spiele” – the Sparkling Games.
Prior to the arrival of NCA activists in mainland Europe, disputes and protests were a usual occurrence amongst the three organisations in Ireland, where they hosted separate racing competitions. At that year’s Tour of Ireland, run several weeks prior to the onset of the Olympics, acts of sabotage were noticeable at diverse points of the course. The route was littered with tacks, causing tyre punctures, and in one area, oil was perilously scattered on the road surface.
The plan to disrupt the Munich event, as Mangan recalls, was devised by Joe Christle, a law alumnus from UCD and a noted Irish Republican who passed away in 1998. Christle, a successful cyclist, was the father of three famed Irish boxing champions, Terri, Joe, and Mel. The stratagem was formulated toward the end of the Tour of Ireland race that year.
Christle fully briefed Mangan about their destinations. The disruption plan involved dividing the riders into two factions. Of the seven riders, four were dispatched to the race start, casually blending in with the other competitors and trying not to attract attention. When the race commenced, their objective was to remain in it as much as possible, competing against the official riders.
The remaining three riders were directed to discreetly wait in a clump of trees along the race route and join the first four as the main body of riders passed their location.
But their plan did not unfold without a touch of absurdity. On the day of the race, the three riders concealed themselves amongst the trees, while the selected four headed for the start line at Grunwald, only to find an utterly deserted venue: none of the anticipated 163 starters from 48 countries were present.
Because they had been extremely low-profile and isolated at 49 Implerstrasse, they had no way of knowing about the formal period of mourning for the victims of the recent Tuesday’s attack, which claimed the lives of six Israeli coaches and five athletes. Even though the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had not cancelled the games, they had declared a day of mourning. As a result, the road race was postponed for 24 hours until 10 am local time on September 7th.
Unbeknownst to the protesters, there was a modification in the schedule. Nevertheless, they covertly took their positions in the trench at the crack of dawn that Wednesday, and remained out of sight for the next hours. Four hours later, the grim reality of their failed disruption plan started to sink in. Although the NCA riders emphasised that they were instructed to keep the protest peaceful, one of the cyclists, namely Pat Healy successfully managed to dodge detection.
The narrative continues by stating, “Four riders, Gabriel Howard, TP Reilly, Pat Healy, and an unnamed cyclist from Belfast showed up at the starting line in white vests, adorned with a Tricolour band. Shortly thereafter, three more demonstrators, including John Mangan, Batty Flynn, and another unnamed activist from Belfast emerged. These three had been hiding in a trench since 7.00 am and they joined the main body of the race as it went past. Flynn surprised everyone by catching up with the main group and racing past them, leading by a 10-yard margin.
His appearance without a competitor number was almost certain to create difficulties for the commentators and the race coordinators. Within the span of another five miles, police riding on motorcycles forced Flynn out of the race. This caused the unusual sight of two competing Irish teams within the race for the next couple of rounds.
Mangan narrated his part of the story saying, “About four or five miles away from the starting point, I joined the Olympic race. I took the lead for a considerable number of miles. Only a Russian competitor managed to keep up with me.”
The protest succeeded in attracting worldwide attention. However, it had destructive repercussions for the cyclists belonging to the official Irish Team, specifically Teggart, who had a severe argument with Mangan. A fallout of this altercation was Teggart taking a tumble from his bicycle which proved to be the end of his international racing career.
Mangan commented about the incident later, “He (Teggart) and I had different perspectives on the matter. Subsequently, we discussed it. He was a decent man and we managed to reconcile. Unfortunately, he passed away a year or two after the event. It would have been preferable for the episode to have culminated differently. He could have completed his race and I could have completed mine.”
Brian Holmes, a 19-year-old cyclist from Belfast, was detained soon after arriving back home and served a three-year sentence at Long Kesh. In a discussion with the Irish News in 2020, he expressed no remorse for his part in the history of the Olympics.
He mentioned that it took some time after the incident for Irish cycling to unite. Having no regrets about his actions, he iterated that if presented with the same situation, he wouldn’t change his decision. He commented on how they were criticised for bringing politics into sports, while bigger countries using sports as a form of protest were seemingly accepted, citing the refusal of former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to send British athletes to Russia in 1980 as an example.
Nowadays, the organisation known as Cycling Ireland stands for cyclists across Ireland, allowing members to choose their favoured nationality, hence maintaining their political and cultural self-identities.