September 5 in History

In September 1960, an eighteen-year-old boxer from Louisville, Kentucky, named Cassius Clay won the light heavyweight gold medal at the Rome Olympics. The victory launched the career of the man who, after changing his name to Muhammad Ali, became one of the most famous and polarizing athletes of the twentieth century.

During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, members of the Palestinian group Black September took Israeli athletes and coaches hostage in the Olympic Village. By the end of the crisis, eleven Israelis and one West German police officer were dead, along with five of the eight attackers. The attack, carried out in front of a vast global television audience, remains the darkest episode in Olympic history and reshaped both international counterterrorism and Olympic security.