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LADANY, AN ULTIMATE SURVIVOR, RECALLS PAINFUL MEMORIES

By NEIL AMDUR

Published: July 13, 2008

Even as the Beijing Olympics beckon next month, with an exotic host city and the

promise of peerless performance, the specter of Munich never quite fades.

     The renewed threat of terrorism, first exposed in the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli

Olympians, now hovers in new forms unspoken through intense security preparations.

The death last month of the sportscaster Jim McKay, who served as the American voice

and conscience of the Munich tragedy, has added another layer of sadness. The August

 publication of the English translation of “King of the Road” (Gefen), the autobiography of

the Israeli race walker Shaul Ladany, is certain to connect the dots between past and present.

     Ladany, 72, is the ultimate survivor. Not just of Munich, where he managed to

escape the wrath of terrorists during the attack in the Olympic village. Ladany also

spent months in a Nazi concentration camp (Bergen-Belsen), had recurring bouts with

skin cancer and lymphoma, and endured enough legal and administrative skirmishes to

wear down most mortals. On July 4, his charter flight to Berlin lost one of its two engines

90 minutes into the air, turned back and made a successful emergency landing in Tel Aviv.

     But then, Ladany has always been beyond us. He speaks nine languages and is a

professor of industrial engineering with 8 patents, 110 scientific papers, 13 books “and more up my sleeve.”

How many athletes, to spare themselves from training under a searing desert sun,

would lay out a course in their house, roll up rugs and walk laps, changing directions

every 15 minutes for hours at a time — with a wife, a daughter and two dogs under the same roof?

     “If they see me walking, they look at me and maybe wonder if I am crazy,” Ladany

said during a recent telephone interview from Israel. “So I had to train them not to lay down in my path.”

     Ladany said he had slowed since accomplishing long-distance world records and a 100-kilometer

world championship. But he was sturdy enough to finish the 4-day, 300-kilometer Paris-to-Brussels walk in May; participated in the recent 7-day, 300-kilometer walk from Schleswig, Germany, to Viborg, Denmark; and will swim 3.5 kilometers across the Sea of Galilee for the 48th time this fall as part of Israel’s largest amateur sports event. Two years ago, during a teaching sabbatical, he became the first 70-year-old to walk 100 miles in 24 hours or less (finishing a course in Ashtabula, Ohio, in 21 hours 45 minutes 34 seconds).

     “He’s quite amazing,” said Ron Laird, the four-time Olympic race walker, who helped lay the course for Ladany in Ohio.

     Laird recalls the time he visited Ladany in Israel and hiked 20 miles with him to Masada, the biblical site. “I took a bus back to Shaul’s house,” Laird said during a recent phone interview. “Shaul walked back.”  In track and field, race walkers are a breed apart because of their distinct mechanical style and almost feverish dedication, Ladany was even more recognizable with his black-frame eyeglasses.

    Ladany, who also competed in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, has always been at odds with some published accounts of the Munich tragedy. He devotes 21 pages of his book to the attack, starting with being awakened “from a deep sound sleep” in the Olympic village and culminating in a lawsuit against the author and publisher of “The Blood of Israel” for being portrayed as “running away by jumping like a goat” in an attempt to escape.

In reality, Ladany wrote, he and two other Israeli Olympians “went out to the terrace, and with straight backs and confident steps we crossed the lawn and left the building behind.”

     Citing dozens of errors in “The Blood of Israel,” Ladany said, “I believe it hurt my character.”

     Ladany was equally critical of German security and botched attempts to save the Israeli hostages at an isolated military airfield.