From the Olympics to outer space The untold story of Munich ’72

The terror attack came shortly before dawn. While thousands of athletes were resting in Munich’s Olympic Village, the peace of a chosen few was forever shattered.

September 5, 1972, was the day the Olympic Games changed irrevocably.

At 4:30 a.m., eight Palestinian gunmen, linked to the militant group Black September, brazenly scaled the fence surrounding the village and made their way to an apartment complex housing the Israeli athletes.

By sunrise, a weightlifting coach and a wrestler had been murdered and nine Israelis were hostages. As tense negotiations began, the media tuned in and the world held its breath.

But any hopes of saving them ended in desperate tragedy.

Shortly after midnight, all the hostages were dead, slaughtered during a botched rescue attempt at a nearby airbase. For the first time in the history of the Games, the Olympics were postponed for 24 hours.

Pictures of the aftermath were chilling: a bloodstained bedroom -- the wall riddled with bullets -- and the charred, mangled wreckage of a Bell helicopter.

But it was the sinister footage of a masked gunman on the balcony, menacing yet expressionless, that became the defining image of the 1972 Munich Olympics.

However, there is another striking image that ultimately emerged from those Games -- so fleeting, and seemingly irrelevant, that nearly everyone missed it at the time. After all, it wasn’t taken during a final, or even a semifinal.

As the photographer clicked away at four sprinters in full flight on the track, neither he nor his subjects could have had any idea that the picture was destined to represent all that was good about humanity.

Five years later, that image was placed on a rocket and blasted into space. In time, that spacecraft will be all that is left of our planet -- the only proof that we ever existed. But as their athletic portraits were sent hurtling through the cosmos, those four runners were totally oblivious to that fact.

Fastest in the world

Running is the purest form of any sport -- nobody needs to explain the rules of a foot race. And sprinters are usually the biggest stars at any Olympic track meet; everybody wants to stake claim as the fastest in the world.

When Edwin Roberts took up running, he wasn’t doing it for fame, fortune or international glory, but for something much sweeter -- at least to a young boy.

Growing up in Trinidad in the 1940s, the fastest kid in the neighborhood would run around the block to try and win a bag of white sugar, as much a status symbol as it was a delicacy.

By 1964, he was tasting international success and was the toast of his country. With a 200-meter bronze medal around his neck -- and two years after Trinidad and Tobago had gained independence from colonial rule -- Roberts became his country’s first Olympic medalist. He would depart Tokyo with a second bronze, in the 4 x 400m relay.

Four years later, he was disappointed not to be on the podium in Mexico City. He’d finished fourth in the 200m and watched from the stadium as John Carlos and Tommie Smith defied the US Olympic Committee, raising their black-gloved fists on the podium in silent protest for racial justice.

The American sprinters had offered Roberts a glove, just in case he finished in the top three. He not only missed out on a coveted medal, but also the chance to appear in one of the most infamous pictures in the history of world sport.

By 1972, he was competing in the Olympics for the third and final time. An Olympic medal eluded him again, but it was a Games he’ll never forget.

In the second week of the 1972 Olympics, he told CNN that he was training his camera on the commotion next door in the village, trying to focus on one of the Palestinian terrorists. He said he only ducked from view when a rifle was swung in his direction.

In both ’68 and ’72, as historic events were unfolding around him, Roberts was either just out of frame or behind the lens.

And the photo that will one day be the only record of his existence is an image he didn’t even see until he opened his email almost half a century later.

‘Just tumbling’

When the defining image of Cathy Rigby was being captured, she was almost totally in the dark.

At the age of 19, the American gymnast was preparing for her second trip to the Olympics and she couldn’t see a thing; fortunately for her, the Olympic routine she was executing in a lime green leotard on the balance beam was something that she could do with her eyes shut. A stroboscopic light was all that photographer Phillip Leonian needed to record Rigby’s various stages of lateral movement.

When Rigby was growing up in Long Beach, California, in the 1950s, she says she didn’t even know the word “gymnastics,” telling CNN from her home, “People thought of it as just tumbling, it was just -- you flipped around.”

In those days, the Soviets, Czechs, East Germans and Japanese gymnasts were vaulting up the medal tables; the Americans (who are now almost totally dominant) had yet to realize anything like their full potential.

So when Rigby went to the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, she was very much a pioneer.

By her own admission, she was a na?ve, wide-eyed child in those days, seeing the world in all its beauty, but she would soon be exposed to its vicious and ugly nature.

From the deadly riots, which left hundreds dead on the eve of the Games in Mexico City, to the backlash faced by Smith and Carlos for their Black Power salute and then the carnage of Munich, Rigby’s Olympic career provided a brutal education.

“I was very sheltered, [and] there certainly was a loss of innocence,” she said. “We all left with a sense of this reality, this is what happens; it wasn’t until many months or years later that I really could understand.”

But it was the destiny of that stroboscopic image on the balance beam one year before Munich that Rigby says she’s spent her lifetime trying to understand.

A consummate professional, she was initially most concerned about her form: “Were my toes pointed? My legs straight? Because that’s how I thought back then.”

Several years later, a friend of her first husband came to visit and he asked, “Do you know you’re on the Voyager?” It was the first Rigby had ever heard of it: “I said, ‘What are you talking about? What is the Voyager?’”

Kingdom in the sky

More than 7,000 athletes lined up to compete in Munich, representing 121 different nations.

Most knew that they wouldn’t experience the joy of taking a bow on the podium, but simply being there was achievement enough. All had incredible stories to tell and some were making history, just by making it to the start line.

Lesotho is known as The Kingdom in the Sky; perched 4,500 feet above sea level, it’s a tiny, landlocked country, surrounded entirely by South Africa. Its people, known as Basotho, speak the language of Sesotho.

Lesotho gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1966 and was eventually recognized by the International Olympic Committee on New Year’s Day, 1972.

Later that year, Lesotho sent a lone representative to compete in the Games, a 27-year-old sprinter named Motsapi Moorosi.

He was a curiosity in Munich; local media were keen to learn more about this new country on the scene.

He told his family that a television station ran a quiz asking if anybody knew what Lesotho was; the story goes that more than one reply guessed it was an Italian wine.

A humble young man with an easy smile and a ready laugh, his name was synonymous with speed. His friends and family recalled to CNN that everyone would proclaim, “You run like Motsapi!” He was putting his country on the map. However, his journey to Munich was about much more than just Lesotho.

Born in South Africa to a Lesotho native, he could easily have represented the Rainbow Nation, but South Africa hadn’t been invited to the Games since 1964 –- punishment for its apartheid government’s abhorrent racist policies.

As he proudly marched instead behind Lesotho’s then green, red and blue flag, featuring the traditional straw hat mokorotlo motif, he was representing his entire region; Moorosi was the first Black athlete from Southern Africa to compete at the Games in 68 years.

Moorosi only ran in three Olympic races -- a heat in the 100m and the first two rounds of the 200m -- but he was a trailblazer in more ways than he could ever have imagined.

Su Wen-ho

When the school day was over in Taiwan, Su Wen-ho would work in the fields near his village, tending the crops; but he was dreaming of much bigger things -- the chance to be an athlete and compete on the world stage.

Yang Chuan-kwang was his inspiration; the so-called “Iron Man of Asia” won the decathlon at the Asian Games in 1954 and ’58 and landed a silver medal at the 1960 Olympics in Rome -- the first for his country.

Su made two trips to the Games; in 1968, he finished last in his 100m heat, his only race in Mexico City. Later, he watched from the stadium as Smith and Carlos bowed their heads and raised their fists, a gesture he didn’t understand at the time.

There was some excitement in his 100m quarterfinal in 1972; confusion over start times meant two of the medal favorites -- Americans Rey Robinson and Eddie Hart -- arrived late, leaving them disqualified and heartbroken. Meanwhile, Su made it to the quarterfinals of both the 100m and 200m events in Munich.

He didn’t recall there being many photographers at his events, so when he saw an image of himself running an outside lane in the first round of the 200m in Munich, he assumed it must have been captured from the place where it was ultimately destined; he thought that the picture was taken by a satellite.

But he didn’t even see it until he was 75 years old -- on July 6, 2020, and he had no idea why it was so significant.

Sprint king

In the beginning, everything is silent; “When you start running, you see and hear nothing,” says Valeriy Borzov, “then the sounds begin to come in, noises from nearby opponents -- one groans, one screams, one whispers or something else.”

The Ukrainian sprinter is describing the intensity of being a laser-focused athlete in the midst of an Olympic sprint, an event so competitive that “six people can sometimes fit in two hundredths of a second.”

He has always tried to remain grounded. He explained that while training as a youngster he’d like to run on the sand, the fragility of the earth beneath his feet helping to strengthen “those so-called starting muscle groups. I was able to get the training that others do not get,” he added.

Borzov might have chosen to play hockey for a living, but it was the dethroning of an older, revered opponent in the local championship in Ukraine’s southern city Nova Kakhovka that persuaded him to stay on the track. “He was literally a king there; that’s when it started. I thought this could bring some kind of success.”

International success quickly followed; two Olympic gold medals in Munich plus four European titles made him a national hero. At the age of 22, Borzov received the Soviet Union’s highest civilian honor, The Order of Lenin.

Having become the first European man to win the Olympic sprint double (a feat only previously achieved by North Americans) he was now being mentioned in the same breath as Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.

Recalling the honor, he told CNN, “It was important for me that I walked on virgin soil. I walked this path and wrote it down in history.”

But by the time he got to the Montreal Games in 1976, he was a marked man -- literally. Moments before the 100m final, he was informed that a threat had been made against his life and that there was a sniper in the stadium; remarkably he summoned up the courage to run the race and still took home the bronze. He said that he didn’t want anyone to think that he was weak.

Four years previously, in the Munich Games marred by the dreadful terror attack, he was closer than he would have liked to the threat of violence -- he said he witnessed some of the terrorists scaling the fence with assault rifles and his accommodation block was just 150 meters from the targeted Israeli team.

“These guys with stockings on their heads were walking on the balcony with rifles and people just stood around watching as if it was a movie,” he recalled. “That still kind of sends shivers; people didn’t believe death was near.”

As terror struck, the Ukrainian-born sprinter was already the star of the Games; to be the fastest man in the world and a double Olympic champion is the dream of any athlete. He was the poster boy of the ’72 Olympics.

But he hadn’t yet basked in the glory for a full 24 hours before the narrative of the Games changed forever. His winning time in the 200m was a neat and tidy 20 seconds flat, but he may ultimately be remembered as number 932.

With thigh muscles bulging and a seemingly effortless gait, that’s how he appeared in the first round of the event, during which very few people would have been paying attention when the camera froze him in time.

That image, however, will be one of the few that survives this Earth, when the Sun explodes and consumes our planet in a few billion years’ time.

How fitting that Valeriy Borzov was once known as “Chelovek Raketa”; they used to call him “Rocket Man.”

‘This is a message from Planet Earth’

When Lomberg turned the page and saw the picture of Su Wen-ho, Motsapi Moorosi, Valeriy Borzov and Edwin Roberts in full flight, he instantly knew that it was going to be on Voyager.

“One of the prime directives that Carl Sagan gave me was ‘this is not a message from the US,’” Lomberg said. “‘This is a message from Planet Earth.’”

For that reason, Lomberg had always imagined that the Olympics might lend itself to their project and here it was, neatly encapsulated in a single frame: “This wonderful photo had representations of different ethnicities -- that added a sense of a global nature to it.”

Drake agreed that this was an image that ticked all the boxes. “We wanted to show that we could run,” he said. “We particularly liked the picture because their feet are in the air and it shows that they’re actually moving quickly.”

But perhaps just as importantly, Drake acknowledged the subtext of the photo. “It was supposed to show that we have these different races and they’re all accepted equally.”

The only thing that separates those men is the speed with which they can move their legs; the picture is a human race and a depiction of the human race.

Also encoded in the frame are other details that sports fans on Earth would simply take for granted.

Lomberg explained that it was helpful that the runners had competition numbers on their singlets -- 773, 603, 932 and 901 -- which might tell the extraterrestrials that we use numbers and units.

If you squint closer, you can just make out a blurry crowd of spectators in the background. It reveals that we have competitive sports and sports as entertainment.

Lomberg is a sports fan and admits that he was tempted to include some personal favorites.

“I love the Boston Red Sox and I would have loved to show Ted Williams slugging one away,” he said. But as a gymnast himself, Lomberg was particularly drawn to the image of Rigby on the balance beam.

“I won’t deny that I was partial to it,” he confessed, but the image earned its place on the mission because it “seemed to so beautifully convey a number of things, how we move, balance, and we tried to indicate the amount of time that little passage that she’s doing took -- this is the rate of speed.”

For every picture that was chosen, there were thousands that were not.

The Voyager team had quickly made the decision not to make it a collection of “Earth’s greatest people,” thus liberating them from any accusation of bias. Nothing was selected because of who was in the frame -- the only criteria was what they were doing in it.

“We didn’t show Cathy Rigby because she was at that time perhaps the greatest American gymnast,” Lomberg said.

“We showed her because she was the person who happened to be in that wonderful stroboscopic picture. If it had been an unknown high school gymnast, I would still have sent that picture.”

In the 43 years since Lomberg and his team scrambled to put the collection together, he’s found plenty of images that “should have been on Voyager.”

He has expressed some regret that a team sport wasn’t represented, but the truth was that he had to move on: “I had found those two wonderful pictures of sport and my attention was probably distracted elsewhere because I hadn’t found anything good about agriculture yet.”

The countdown clock to launch was ticking. Voyager would wait for no man.

In later years, the Voyager team has concluded that perhaps some of their picture choices could be misleading.

Rigby’s image might suggest that we can all walk on our hands, while the sprinters might imply that there is a subspecies of humans who all have one leg longer than the other; at least, that’s how it looks in the picture.

Not only that, but some humans can hover four inches in the air -- in the instant that photo was captured, only one man had a foot on the ground.

What’s Google?

In 2010, Moorosi was in his mid-60s. He couldn’t have known it then, but he was in the twilight of his life; early in 2013, he would die of cancer.

Recently, CNN gathered his widow, son, daughter and granddaughter around their computer in Lesotho to learn more about him.

“He asked me one day, what’s this Google thing?” recalled his son Mocheko. “So I explained to him that it’s a search engine where you can find anything that’s a public record. So he typed his name and a lot of pictures came up.”

Among the images on his computer screen: round one, heat three of the 1972 200m event in Munich. He’d never seen it before. “He was amazed!” Mocheko remembered.

What Motsapi never knew, and what his family never knew, was what else happened to that picture.

On the video call, CNN laid out what our reporting had uncovered so far -- why the picture was chosen, where the probe had been, what it was doing now and how it would still exist when we had all been ground to dust.

They listened intently and when asked how they felt about it -- after a brief pause to account for the satellite delay -- there was a synchronized explosion of joy.

“Wow!” Everyone in the room was laughing and smiling, unable to fully process what they’d just learned.

Beyond the profound magnitude of Motsapi’s involvement with Voyager, his family kept coming back to the number 120; only 120 images were chosen, and he was one of them.

Asked how they thought he would have responded, had he known, his widow Mamocheko said, “Just laughing and laughing and smiling and smiling, saying ‘I cannot believe this is really happening.’ I think he would have been so amazed.”

In a separate call, one of his best friends and former business partner Dan O’Connell choked up as he thought about Motsapi.

“This is a great story to honor this guy,” he said. “Maybe his soul is going all over the universe now and you couldn’t have a brighter person who would be caring for all people. I would say Motsapi deserves his place on that spaceship.”

Fascinated by stars

When Roberts was a child, he would look up at the night sky in Trinidad and wonder what could be up there.

He says he was fascinated by the stars, but it never occurred to him that he might one day be among them. Roberts was much more interested in moving fast on the ground beneath his feet.

As for the picture which is now in space, he’d never even seen it until he opened an email from CNN more than 40 years after the launch date.

After a quick discussion, he was asked how he felt about it and his response implied he was struggling to truly comprehend his association with Voyager.

“The picture has gone to outer space and so on and so forth,” Roberts said. “It was sent off into space and, well, the purpose, whatever purpose it was.”

Should the researchers have asked for his permission?

“Well, they could have asked,” he said, “but they would have got permission. You know, it's once in a lifetime that you get an opportunity for something like that. By them sending it out, it still means something to me and the rest of my family.”

By the end of our conversation, one sensed that Roberts had a clearer understanding of the Voyager project; what does he think when he looks at the picture of his younger self?

“I see a person who loves track and field, [and] not only a love of track and field, but a love of human beings,” Roberts said. “I see myself representing not only my country, Trinidad and Tobago, I'm representing myself and other people of color. I think of everybody as one -- we are one human being.”

‘Do not return without a victory!’

As the golden disc team was hastily collating their picture album of humanity, they couldn’t escape the politics of the day; the late 1970s represented the mid-point of the Cold War. It is a testament to the integrity of their mission statement that these American scientists and researchers included such a prominent image of a Soviet icon, Borzov.

As he was making his final selections, Lomberg felt that the presence of Rigby and Borzov, an American and Soviet featured so prominently in adjacent images, provided an element of balance and fairness.

However, given how bitterly competitive the two programs were during the space race, he has often wondered if the Soviets would have extended America the same courtesy -- had the Golden Record been compiled behind The Iron Curtain.

To any alien life form in the distant future, such a detail will be utterly irrelevant but the gesture wasn’t lost on Borzov himself; he remembers how Communist Party members tried to motivate the Soviet team in 1972, saying “It’s a golden jubilee, 50 years since the formation of the Soviet Union! You’re going into the enemy’s lair! Do not return without a victory!”

He’d already traveled the world and explained, “We knew better than them how Americans actually behaved. I remember what was nice -- a hot dog and a glass of Coca-Cola. We didn’t need that kind of rhetoric instilled in us before our departure.”

Borzov was vaguely aware that his image was associated with the Voyager project, but only because some local journalists wrote about it several years later. And until CNN contacted him, he’d never seen the picture.

Surprisingly, he doesn’t particularly like it, exclaiming, “It’s not the best photo!”

“Firstly, the running position is not the best. The starting position is when the muscles are visible and there is a certain posture where you can see power and character -- this is some sort of frame between moments.” He went on, “I don’t like such photographs and this is one of the preliminary races, a work-in-progress, not the historical one. It’s not the final shot.”

Nonetheless, he has wondered why he was chosen. Without prompting, he volunteers that he ran as a clean athlete, without resorting to the doping techniques that marred much of the Soviet athletic program. “I wasn’t inflated,” he said, noting that you can tell the difference between “a running cockerel and a broiler chicken.”

Maybe he was chosen for his running style, which -- in his words -- could be described as “classic, light and with great power and intelligence.” Or maybe it was his all-around character, his “unification of power, sportiness, physical qualities, intellectual, psychological and other gentleman-like qualities.”

Borzov is now learning the truth about how and why he was sent to the stars and his reaction is humble and earthly: “To be told that you are flying outside of our civilization would be a kick to a sane person. But the most important thing is that it’s a compliment from the Americans. That deserves both praise and gratitude.”

“This is something that obviously really touched me, and this is something that cannot be measured.”

‘Blown away’

Of all the Voyager athletes, it’s clear that Rigby has the greatest understanding of the project; it’s something that she has spent a fair amount of time thinking about.

Like Roberts, she wishes that she’d been asked, but only so that she could have watched the launch and enjoyed it in the moment. “I would have said yes anyway,” she added quickly.

“I was blown away,” she said. “I don't often mention it and I don't know why I don't, because besides being born, having children and dying, it is the most profound thing I can imagine in a person's life because you get to be a representative of humanity.

“It’s like an adventure that you’ve been put on and you just go, ‘Wow, why me?’”

After retiring from her gymnastics career in 1972, Rigby has spent much of the rest of her life performing on stage. It’s somehow fitting that she became well known for playing Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie’s fictional character -- the boy who could fly amongst the stars.

She draws on that character to try and find the words: “It’s a dream, like Peter Pan says, this great adventure that you will never know what ultimately happens.”

“It's just not something that you can wrap your mind around,” she continued. “But your heart can and your imagination can, and it gives you a tingly feeling.”

While the Voyager athletes were chosen to help teach other worlds about our own, many of them ultimately found that profession down here on Earth.

Roberts taught PE for more than four decades; for a period of time after the Olympics, Moorosi worked with the Lesotho government in their department of Education and Sport, and Su became a professor of health management in Taiwan. Borzov was a minister and a lawmaker, and all, in their own way, were pioneers.

Rigby now works with children with special needs. “I find my favorite thing is when those children have that ‘aha moment,’ when all of a sudden, they do something that they thought impossible. And they look at you and go ‘what just happened?’”