Mary Peters: ‘Belfast's people are warm and loving. I didn’t have any bias towards one side or the other.’

The Olympic pentathlon gold medallist recalls the death threat and horror of Munich 1972, the Troubles, and promoting Belfast.

Batonbearer Lady Mary Peters holds the Queen's Baton beside the Northern Ireland netball team during the Birmingham 2022 Queen's Baton Relay at a visit to PWC on June 24, 2022 in Northern Ireland. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images for the Birmingham 2022 Queen's Baton Relay)

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.”