For 40 years, through nine Olympic Games since that dreadful day in Munich in 1972, Ankie Spitzer has lost neither hope nor determination. And, despite the now-customary rebuff, she has not given up on the 10th Olympiad, shortly to begin in London. All she wants, as the widow of one of the 11 Israeli athletes killed in a terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics 40 years ago this summer, is an official moment of remembrance, a minute's silence, an acknowledgement of lost lives.
Her decades-long battle goes beyond personal grief for a passionate love brutally cut short and for a newborn baby left without a father. It is also about the Olympic ideal, which puts the political differences and conflicts between nations to one side in pursuit of sporting excellence and athletic comradeship.
"Just do it once, and I'll be gone. I just want to hear it," she says at her home in Ramat Hasharon, near Tel Aviv. "If they had granted a minute's silence, they would have got rid of us by now. But every four years we come back. We are a pain in the neck for them."
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