“After 200 meters it was over again,” Sabine Thürmel remembers August 25, 1972. It was an exciting day for Grünwald and especially for a number of athletes from the community. Because at 5:55 p.m. the Olympic flame passed the market square, carried by several TSV Grünwald activists. Sabine Thürmel, then 15 years old, was the companion of Brigitte Vogt, captain of her volleyball team. Whether the torch was hot, how accurate the handover was – Thürmel no longer knows all that exactly after 50 years. “But being so close to the Olympic flame was just great.” From the Grünwalder Bridge to the Geiselgasteig, seven runners, each flanked by two companions, carried the torch in the direction of Munich, passing it on every 200 meters.
Numerous onlookers gathered at the market square for the torch relay. On August 26, 1972 at 4.20 p.m. the fire was then lit by athlete Günther Zahn in the Munich Olympic Stadium, whereby the games of the XX. Olympiad opened. The runners from Grünwald, on the other hand, gathered for a small celebration right after the big event. 15-year-old Sabine drank beer for the first time and was pretty tipsy afterwards, she remembers today.
One of the torchbearers from Grünwald was the 22-year-old cyclist Manfred Ernst. He was a multiple Bavarian champion, in 1969 he had won the Isar Valley Criterion, which was first initiated by the Munich Sturmvogel cycling club in 1952, and was considered a great talent. However, he missed qualifying for the Olympic road race, which also took place in the Isar Valley on September 7, 1972, with the start and finish in his home town of Grünwald. Ernst died in April 1999 at the age of just 49.
The Olympic Flame started on July 28 at 10:15 a.m. in ancient Olympia on the Greek Peloponnese peninsula. The 19-year-old basketball player John Kikilessis was the first of the 6,500 runners to complete a stage. The fire made its way through Turkey, Bulgaria, what was then Yugoslavia, Hungary and Austria to Germany. It reached the Bavarian border in Freilassing at 5:10 p.m. on August 23.
In addition to TSV Grünwald, the clubs TSV Oberhaching-Deisenhofen, TSV Ottobrunn, SV Höhenkirchen and TSV Unterhaching were also involved in the torch relay in the southern district of Munich before the torch left the district at Menterschwaige in the direction of the state capital.