Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

time, he was very surprised. He’d played for the state for the first time in 1971, rating his performance ‘good but inconsistent’ for a team that, in view of Western Australia’s great record, had finished an ‘undistinguished third’ in the inter-state championships in Brisbane. Not included in the Australian squad that went to Barcelona for the World Cup later that year, he had no expectations of Olympic selection, despite a good season in club hockey and strong form for the national under-21 team in Adelaide later in 1971. He was so stunned by his Olympic selection that he recalled very little of the cricket later that day, nursing a vague suspicion he may have batted with an unwonted ‘wild abandon’. 13 In May that year he played his first hockey international in New Zealand, the first of 227 international matches. But Olympic selection had brought, not for the last time, serious disruption of his medical studies, as he wrestled ‘with the complexities of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and neuro-anatomy’. * * * * * After an ‘idyllic’ period, enjoying the sights of Munich and superb Olympic facilities, Ric’s first Games were transformed by the horrors of the Palestinian terrorist attack on 5 September, in which two Israeli athletes were killed immediately and nine others during a failed rescue attempt at the airport. The attack was a shock but, in retrospect, not a great surprise to Ric, who more than once had taken advantage of relaxed security to scale the fence of the Olympic Village. At breakfast that morning he and his team-mates had no idea why track-suited figures were clambering over buildings 500 metres away, until the American forces radio told them of the gravity of the situation. Thereafter they probably knew no more about events than the rest of the world, watching the drama unfolding on television. Although the Games were suspended for a day, and there was talk of abandoning them altogether, Ric had little doubt they were always going to resume. He admitted quite frankly that he ‘wanted nothing to interfere’ with his first taste of life away from Australia. But inevitably heightened security intervened, while an ageing team – in which 1970-1976 25 13 The Coach , p 33.