Israeli gold

Windsurfer Gal Fridman won a first-ever Olympic gold medal for Israel yesterday:

With a half moon rising behind him, and an orange sun plunging beneath the Saronic Gulf before him, Gal Fridman stood where no Israeli man or woman had ever set foot. He was on top of an Olympic platform, on top of the world, when the anthem started playing and the people started crying and the 32-year-old memory of 11 murdered athletes and coaches finally climbed up a Summer Games flagpole for everyone to see.

It was 8:04 p.m. in the small amphitheater when the public address announcer read these historic words: "Ladies and gentlemen, the national anthem of Israel." On cue, two young Athenians dressed in white, Panayiotis Mitrou and Kostas Leontaritis, sent up Israel's flag to the sounds of Hatikvah, the Hebrew word for hope.

"We're very proud to do this for Israel," Leontaritis would say. "Every country should be treated the same."
.....
"It's a gold medal for all the people of Israel," Fridman said. "We think about the people who were trying to do their best in sport and were murdered, and we hope that this will never happen again."

The Israelis sang and cried and danced. Thirty-two years too late, a proper Olympic tribute was paid to their dead.

See also here:

The spontaneity, the brashness, the freshness, the unadorned, genuine, unsophisticated, typically Israeli nature of it all. There are moments in the life of a nation where you revel in its particularity.

Now is one of those moments.

In the New York Times, Selena Roberts relates this Israeli triumph to the earlier Iranian episode - see here and follow the links back - and the reaction of the International Olympic Commitee. (Hat tip: Jake/Jeff Abramowitz.)