The 1972 Olympic Games are to experience a jubilant anniversary in Munich.
Nine sports will hold their European Championships there simultaneously in August, and it will be a joint celebration.
The joy has apparently already passed the track and field athletes.
After Munich, their European association announces that they will drop out.
Wherever the private organizers want to hold the third European Championships in 2026: the track and field athletes will then fight for their titles in Birmingham or Budapest.
Bishops, knights and throwers are not the first to leave.
The swimmers who were there at the premiere in Glasgow in 2018 are already missing in Munich - a television event to which the track and field athletes were tuned in from the Olympic Stadium in Berlin.
Now physically present in Munich, the track and field athletes experience that although they are the driving force of the event, their German association is not even involved, but rather switched off.
The European Championships are the competition of two resourceful entrepreneurs by the grace of the European television association EBU.
He has agreed on the date and program with the hosts Munich, he determines the organization and staff.
How could the track and field athletes know eight weeks in advance that the event would not be a success, is heard from Munich.
The ratings speak a different language.
From the European Athletics Championships in Zurich in 2014, a single event, to the European Championships in Berlin in 2018 as part of the multi-championships, the number of viewers rose by 13 percent from 343 million to 388 million.
Track and field athletics is not a team sport, one could say, it probably consists not only of the athletes, but also of lone fighters in the leadership.
That would mean overlooking the fact that the supposedly bulky European association has just joined the 2023 European Games in Poland with its European Team Championship.
The DLV has nothing to report
Above all, it would mean ignoring the dissatisfaction in the German association.
The DLV is not the host of this European Athletics Championship.
Better: He has nothing to report there.
If the association management wants to invite guests to competitions with outstanding German athletes, they have to buy tickets from the organizer.
TV viewers won't notice the split.
Athletics will probably be added to the joint program again in four years.
However, the sports festival in Munich, the anniversary of the 1972 games that can be experienced locally, will be a unique sports festival that will not be repeated.