Powerful New ESPN E60 Relives 1972 Munich Olympics Through Eyes of Survivor

In a powerful new ESPN E60, Jeremy Schaap travels to Israel and Germany to tell the story of Israeli race walker Shaul Ladany.

What’s Happening:

A powerful and emotional new episode of ESPN E60 will look back 50 years to one of the darkest moments in sports history – the Munich Massacre, when Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli sportsmen at the 1972 Summer Olympics. E60 will tell the story of one Israeli athlete, now 86, who survived, just as he had survived World War II and the Holocaust when he was a child.
The Survivor will debut on Tuesday, Sept. 20, at 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN, available for on-demand streaming on ESPN+ after the initial airing.

In E60’s The Survivor, Shaul Ladany reflects on the arc of his life – from World War II and the Holocaust, to Munich, and beyond. Jeremy Schaap traveled to Israel and Germany to profile a man of unmatched endurance, physically and spiritually, who has repeatedly survived the unthinkable.
An unspeakable act of violence that changed countless lives, the Munich Massacre was the first terrorist attack broadcast live on television around the world. Eleven Israelis and one German police officer were killed. In its wake, life would never feel quite so safe again, especially at sports events.
Long before Munich, Ladany, a race walker and one of Israel’s most accomplished athletes, already understood what it meant to be targeted for death.
In 1941, when the Germans attacked his native Yugoslavia, and a bomb fell directly on his house, he survived. Three years later, when he was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where the Germans killed 50,000 people, he survived. Twenty-eight years later, in Munich, wearing the star of David as a proud Israeli, Ladany would find himself in the crosshairs of history again.
Through archival video and news reports, along with new interviews and reporting, E60 tells the story of Munich, through Ladany’s eyes.
Others interviewed for The Survivor include Zelig Shtroch, a shooter on the Israeli Olympic team and roommate of Ladany, who has been haunted by survivor’s guilt for 50 years; Shlomo Levy, an Israeli photojournalist who was embedded with the team in Munich and was staying in the same building; and Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.
The Survivor was produced and directed by Frank Saraceno.
Other ESPN platforms also will contribute to the presentation: a written piece by Schaap will be published on ESPN.com; excerpts from The Survivor will be featured in segments on Outside the Lines in SportsCenter; and the story will be explored in an upcoming edition of the ESPN Daily Podcast.
After the premiere on ESPN, the program will be available on ESPN+ and will re-air multiple times across ESPN networks.
The Survivor debuts Tuesday, September 20th, on ESPN and ESPN+.