Sports Attorney, Educator & Thought Leader on Interface of Higher Education and Sports. Currently Professor at Seton Hall University Law School
The opening ceremonies of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, captured on film, the first Olympics I can remember, with the entrance of the Olympic flame, accompanied by the greatest middle distance runners of the world including Kip Keino and Jim Ryun who competed on this track. These Games that began in such overt joy (and synthesizer music) and hope ended tragically and so the hopes of the city of Munich and of West Germany to finally put the horrors of the past in the past were dashed in violence. The murder of the Israeli athletes who came only to compete remains a tear in the fabric of sport. The Olympic Games, even with the attendant politics, commercialism, and corruption that accompany them, for me represent the purest of striving and of hope for the future. As the youth of the world assembles in Paris, a city of incomparable beauty, it is both my hope and prayer, that these Games go off without violence and honor the spirit of the athletes assembled and that even in a divided contentious world we can celebrate the human spirit. By the time they end, I do know that the athletes in victory and defeat will have honored that spirit. I am fortunate enough, after being an 8 year-old watching those Munich opening ceremonies from my Grandmother's sofa, to now work with several sport organizations from the U.S. and Canada competing in Paris and who are living the vision of a better world I saw for the first time on display in Munich. #Olympics #OlympicSpirit #Paris2024 #OlympicHistory #ValueofSport #Aspriation #BeautyofSport
