“He warned that if I came home to Belfast I’d be shot and my flat would be bombed,” Mary Peters says of the anonymous man who threatened to kill her after she won gold in the pentathlon at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. The call was made just before, at those same Olympics, the Palestinian group Black September killed two members of the Israeli team and took nine hostages. Seventeen people eventually lost their lives in that terrorist attack.
Peters looks out at the track which bears her name in Belfast and, after all these years, relives the memories – which have been intensified by recent atrocities in Israel and Gaza. “I’d love to meet the person who made the call to know why he did it,” she says of the man who put her in danger at the height of the Troubles. “Of course, my dad wanted me to go to Australia. But I said: ‘No way. I’m going home to Belfast.’ And I’m still here to tell the tale.”
At the age of 84, Peters remains a remarkable woman. Her achievement in becoming an Olympic champion was made even more powerful by the fact that her training facilities were virtually non-existent while her rivals in eastern Europe were full-time professionals who received state backing and, in some cases, doping assistance. Peters, instead, carved out a lonely path which is captured in her absorbing autobiography.
It took a year before she finally learned the full extent of the death threat which said: “Mary Peters is a Protestant and has won a medal for Britain. An attempt will be made on her life and it will be blamed on the IRA. I don’t want to turn her into a martyr. Her home will be going up in the near future.”
Peters refused to be intimidated because, as she says now: “Northern Ireland had been going through such terrible times in the Troubles that I just wanted to bring some good news.”
The police took the warning so seriously that special branch security officers shadowed Peters, who was oblivious to their presence, on her flight home and all through her celebratory return to Belfast. “They brought me down Royal Avenue in an open-topped lorry,” she says of the welcoming committee. “There was ticker tape coming out of the windows and, at the lord mayor’s reception at the top of the road, I said: ‘I went for gold, I won gold and I brought it home for you.’ I didn’t have any bias towards one side or the other. I felt we were one as a city.”
Did she feel any fear? “Never. I’d achieved success in sport and I’m not political or religious in any way. Why would anybody want to harm me? So I had no fear coming home.”
The worst year of the Troubles was 1972. After Bloody Sunday, when the British army killed 14 unarmed civilians in Derry that January, Peters was caught up in sectarian violence in Belfast on July 21st, 1972. Twenty-two bombs exploded across the city, killing nine people, and as Peters says: “I learned a lesson about the stupidity of bravado by leading two waitresses from a restaurant straight into crossfire.”
She shakes her head and, on a mild autumn day, says: “We had been out for dinner and so we had to crawl on our hands and knees to get into a taxi to get home because they were shooting from down the street. It’s strange but you learn to live with it.”
Just 44 days later, on September 3rd, Peters set a world record and won Olympic gold by the narrowest of margins, claiming the title by one-tenth of a second as she ran the race of her life in the 200m. It had been such a consuming and dramatic pentathlon that she accepted a cigarette offered afterwards by her closest rival, Heide Rosendahl from West Germany. I laugh and Peters hangs her head in mock shame when she admits that the five events spread across two days had been so tense that she actually smoked a whole pack of cigarettes in-between competing.
“It’s ridiculous and I don’t like children to read that. A doctor said to me once: ‘Imagine if you didn’t smoke. How good could you really have been?’ I said: ‘I couldn’t be better than gold.’ But almost everyone on the team smoked back then. We all used to race to duty-free to get our bottles and our cigarettes. But I quit smoking in 1974 because I was collecting money to build this track and I didn’t want anybody to see me smoking. I’m really glad I stopped.”
She always set an uplifting example because, if she was invited to talk about her exploits at a loyalist club on the Shankill Road, Peters made sure that would also address a gathering on the republican side of the Falls Road. She saw everyone as people, rather than members of warring factions separated by the bitter sectarian divide. But the conflict ran so deep that, in March 1973, the Troubles again shook her.
Four British soldiers had been lured by the promise of a party at a house around the corner from where Peters lived. Three were killed instantly while the fourth soldier managed to crawl away. But he had also been fatally injured and he died on the pathway leading to Peters’s front door. She had fallen asleep in front of the TV before waking and preparing to go to bed about 11pm, when she looked out of the window.
“I saw the solider, the ambulances and the police all outside. It wasn’t until the following morning and I turned on the news that I heard what actually happened. I was going to work and the television cameras were outside. I knew they had filmed me coming out of my front door and crossing the road. But I happened to know the controller of the BBC and rang him and said: ‘Please, don’t let me be seen coming out of the house because somebody might believe I’m implicated in some way.’ He was able to edit it.”
Did she despair at the thought that conflict in Northern Ireland might never end? “Well, my father always used to say that, here in Northern Ireland, we have the most beautiful coastal road in the world. I couldn’t believe people could go on destroying things that were valuable to everybody. When they were bombing and killing, I wanted to promote Northern Ireland in the best possible way. So, when I was travelling, people would say: ‘Where’d you come from?’ And I’d say: ‘I’m proud I come from Belfast, Northern Ireland.’ They’d go: ‘Oh!’”
Peters laughs at the shock her positivity caused. “I still feel very happy to promote Northern Ireland because it is so special. The people are its greatest asset, because they’re warm and friendly and loving.”
Belfast is now a vibrant and usually peaceful city. The warmth of its people is exemplified by Peters who looks sad only once during our 80 minutes together. Even the grim memory of the Munich massacre is swamped by the appalling death and devastation, pain and rage that escalates in Israel and Gaza. “It’s horrendous,” she says. “Why can’t we love living together in peace and harmony? I can’t stop thinking of the women and children who have been mowed down and beheaded and bombed. I can’t believe people could do that. So it has reminded me of Munich even though, back in 1972, I was oblivious at first to what really happened.
“It was the morning after I won the Olympics and I woke up feeling happy that I was taking the girl opposite, Janet Simpson, into town to buy her wedding present. She was marrying a Swiss athlete. But she said: ‘Look.’ The Olympic Village was surrounded by tanks. But we didn’t have television, computers or mobile phones. There was no means of communication so we didn’t know what was going on.
“We still went into Munich to buy the wedding present. We had lunch and when I came back that evening I went up to my room in the lift and asked a lady I met: ‘What happened today?’ She said: ‘Black September came in and they took some of the Israelis hostage, but they’re all safe.’ Little did I know until afterwards that so many had been killed. I’ve been back to Munich three times to pay my respects to those who died, because it could have been me if the man who made the phone call had done that. I feel the terrible loss of life in the name of sport.”
Peters has devoted her subsequent years to helping so many young people through sport. The contrast with her own past is striking. There were no real track-and-field facilities in Northern Ireland when Peters began training as a girl. Her father gave her two tonnes of sand as a gift for her 15th birthday so that he could build her a long jump pit in the back garden – which he soon supplemented with a shot put circle that he also made himself.
There was just one tartan track in Belfast in 1972 and it had cracks and holes in it. Peters rebuilt the track which she has since revamped and renewed. The Mary Peters Track is used by people from across the communities every day while her trust fund has raised hundreds of millions of pounds and helped more than 4,500 young people – including now famous sporting names from Darren Clarke and Graeme McDowell to Carl Frampton and Michael Conlan. Olympic and Paralympic medallists have also achieved success thanks to the trust which offers financial backing and access to a team of experts who act as advisers when needed.
“They represent all sports and they come from all backgrounds and they can be able-bodied or have a disability,” Peters says of those she has helped over the past 40 years. “Michael McKillop, a five-time Paralympic gold medallist, was there last night to promote my book, and he’s just retired. Michael is loyal because he remembers that we helped him in his early days. We have twins [Chloe and Judith Maccombe] in Londonderry who are doing the para-triathlon and they’re called the Tandem Twins. They’re 25 years old and I am mesmerised by them.
“They live on a farm near Londonderry. They go to the city to do their training in the morning and then they work on the farm in the afternoon. One of them is fifth-best in the world and they’ve only been training for four years. So hopefully they’ll get to Paris next year and come back with medals.”
Her energy and resolve seem undiminished and Peters looks thrilled when she tells me that she recently led 12 events in a single week. “It was great,” she says, in continued defiance of the man who threatened to kill her if she came back to Belfast as an Olympic champion, “and I’ve still got a lot more to do.” – Guardian
♦ Mary Peters: My Story is published by Blackstaff Press
