Olympic walking champion Bernd Kannenberg: a Sunday child

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Bernd Kannenberg on the way to Olympic victory in Munich

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Bettmann Archive / Getty Images

Sunday.

A special day.

Those who have luck in life are called a Sunday child.

Bernd Kannenberg was a Sunday child, he not only experienced a special Sunday, it was even a golden Sunday, THE golden Sunday.

And what do you mean: he experienced it?

Bernd Kannenberg shaped it on September 3, 1972, which German sports history knows as the "golden Sunday of athletics".

This September 3rd is the ninth day of the Munich Summer Olympics, it is the fourth day of athletics competitions.

Kannenberg was already 30 years old when he started the Olympics, and you can say without hurting him that his name didn't mean much to many Germans until then.

Because Kannenberg is a walker, and as much as athletics is the queen of the Olympic Games, the walkers are just as much a part of this queen's rank and file.

It is an exotic sport that is often relocated to the early morning hours of a competition day at major events when the stadium is not yet full.

Most of the distance, just over 50 kilometers, the walkers are out in the city somewhere, far less perceived by the spectators than the marathon runners.

In contrast to the GDR, which established a whole walking school after Christoph Höhne's Olympic victory in Mexico in 1968 and developed world-class athletes with Hartwig Gauder and Ronald Weigel in the years that followed, walking in West Germany is an orchid discipline.

A sport that is ridiculed

A sport with an extremely demanding and complicated sequence of movements.

This sometimes looks strange to observers and sometimes provokes cheap ridicule when the athletes twist their hips, straighten their legs in order to keep ground contact with every step at maximum speed in order to avoid disqualification.

Young people who want to do athletics can run, throw or jump.

But he doesn't go.

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Bernd Kannenberg with his gold medal

Photo: imago images

Kannenberg is one of them too.

He started out as a folk runner, it wasn't until he was almost biblical about the age of 27 that he started training while walking, and he immediately noticed how good he was at this sport.

1969 is his first year of walking, and two years later he is German champion, another year later, shortly before the games, he runs a world record over 50 kilometers.

For Munich he is one of the favorites, but over the 20-kilometer distance he has to give up exhausted and battered, the 50 kilometers on September 3rd is his second and last chance.

On this day it goes out of the Olympic Stadium onto the streets of Munich, and this time the walkers experience something unusual.

100,000 people stand by the roadside.

Munich these days is a swinging city, light, happy, international, as Italian as Munich can be on its best days, carried by an infectious enthusiasm for this event, and walkers are carried away in this flow of heat.

The events come thick and fast

In the stadium, meanwhile, events from the hosts' point of view are tumbling: the elegant Hildegard Falck runs 800 meters to gold and a world record, on the home straight she has the upper hand in a breathtaking duel with the Soviet Russian Nijole Sabaite.

At the same time, the great Latvian Janis Lusis and Klaus Wolfermann deliver a thrilling duel in the javelin throw, Lusis is the big favorite, but the German snatches the gold medal from him in the fifth attempt with a throw over 90 meters.

Javelin thrower Klaus Wolfermann

Photo: 

Roland Witschel DPA

As if that wasn't enough, Heide Rosendahl, one of the darlings of these games, fights from fifth to silver in the pentathlon.

The spectators in the Olympic Stadium are already intoxicated, two golds, one silver, when Kannenberg is the first to enter the running track through the stadium gate, the stadium is raging, almost 80,000 people pay their full attention to the German's last round of the stadium.

At the finish he throws his arms up and all of Germany suddenly knows Bernd Kannenberg.

Three gold medals within a short period of time, an unprecedented wave of euphoria waves through the stadium.

The British experience a similar moment many years later at their 2012 games in London, when Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis and Greg Rutherford won athletics gold within 45 minutes and enraptured the nation.

Super Saturday has been around since then.

Pain forces you to give up

It is the career climax of the professional soldier.

Two years later he finished second again at the European Championship, in 1978 he had to end his career, the pain due to this physically demanding sport became too strong.

Kannenberg had a training load of up to 300 kilometers a week, six hours a day on the road, every two weeks he had worn out a pair of running shoes.

At some point, the body stopped doing that.

The wear was too extreme.

After his sports career, he worked for a while as the national coach of walkers, but he had to give up that too for health reasons.

This September 3, 1972, it was not only Kannenberg's biggest day, it was perhaps also the climax of the cheerful games, even if the next day 16-year-old Ulrike Meyfarth went one better with her Olympic victory in the high jump.

Terrorists attacked the Olympic Village on September 5th, and no one could ever speak of cheerful games again afterwards.

Wolfermann, Rosendahl, Falck - great athletes, who also celebrated great successes on other days: world championships, Olympic victories.

But no name will be so associated with the golden Sunday as Bernd Kannenberg's.

One moment in time.

He died on Wednesday at the age of 78.

This time you can actually put it this way: Bernd Kannenberg has passed away.

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