The Munich massacre in 1972 Olympics

​“We just got the final word... you know, when I was a kid, my father used to say "Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized." Our worst fears have been realized tonight,” said the famed American sports journalist Jim McKay, after receiving the official confirmation on death toll of the hostages in Munich.

Amusingly, so keen was West Germany to cast away the imagery of the militarised Third Reich as presented by Adolf Hitler in the inauguration of the 1936 Berlin Games, that security was kept deliberately lax. It was then only inevitable that the athlete’s village would find itself a target by known terrorist groups.

Palestinian terrorist group Black September took eleven Israeli Olympic team members hostage, and demanded the release of 234 prisoners jailed in Israel along with the founders of the Red Army Faction, who were being held in Germany. The Munich police were not equipped to deal with a hostage situation, while restrictions in the post-war German constitution meant that the army could not participate in rescue operation as well. The 16-hour standoff ended with the devastating death of 11 Israeli athletes and a German police officer.

Three separate attacks on Iraqi athletes in 2006

More than a year later, the remains of 13 team members — mostly skulls and bones entangled in tattered sports uniforms — were found near the main highway leading to Jordan

AP

In 2006, Iraq's sporting fraternity was attacked on three different occasions. On 17 May, a taekwondo team of 15 members - athletes and coaches -  were kidnapped on their way to Jordan for a tournament, and it was not until a year had passed that their remains were found on a highway. Just nine days after that incident, masked gunmen killed an Iraqi tennis coach and two of his players.

Even before the nation could recover from this shock, on July 15, 37 athletes and officials, including the head of the Iraq's Olympic Committee Ahmed al-Hadjiya, were abducted from a sports conference in Baghdad by 50 gunmen. Only 13 of those people were eventually released.

People were screaming in the hotel and I saw a number of dead people lying on the road. It was horrific.

Waqar Younis

"People were screaming in the hotel and I saw a number of dead people lying on the road. It was horrific," said Waqar Younis, the then Pakistan captain. In one single moment, all the fears international teams had been screaming about playing in Pakistan finally came true, and cricket was scared like never before. A suicide bomber parked his car next to bus, outside the Sheraton Hotel, and detonated it. Many Kiwi and Pakistani cricketers were staying in the very same hotel, and the blast killed Pakistan cricket team's physiotherapist, two civilians, and 11 French Naval experts, along with injuring 40 others. The New Zealand team returned home after the incident, and it turned out to be a cautionary tale of things to come in the future.

Seven years after that terrifying suicide blast in 2002, cricket once again came under attack from terrorism, this time at Lahore. The Sri Lankan team was at the receiving end this time around and the cricketing world was rocked to its core. After all, the Islanders were only touring Pakistan after India had pulled out due to security concerns, just a year after the Mumbai attacks.

Bombing at the world's oldest annual marathon in 2013

It was a sun-filled afternoon in April in Boston and some 23,000 participants took part in 117th edition of the Boston Marathon on Patriot's day. At 2:49 in the afternoon, with more than 5600 runners still in the race, two pressure-cooker bombs, which were packed with shrapnel, went off near the finish line, and chaos rained down.

Three spectators were killed, one of whom was an 8-year-old boy, and 260 people were injured. Two brothers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were responsible for this carnage, although they were never formally linked with any of the known terrorist groups. Two men with distorted ideologies and access to internet, where they learned how to make the bomb, made sure that 16 people lost their legs, including a 7-year-old girl, at a marathon which is supposed to be a celebration of human spirit and endurance. What was supposed to be a celebration of human endurance ended up being another reminder of how much we all are vulnerable in today’s world.

When I reached the entrance to the Village, the gate had shut. I pleaded with the guards to let me in and showed them my credentials. I told them my parents had gone home and public transport had been shut down. I had nowhere to go.

Leander Paes

It was a carnival atmosphere at the Centennial Olympic park. There was a music concert, and hundreds of people had gathered to soak up the atmosphere. Suddenly, three pipe bombs, planted by Eric Robert Rudolph, went off killing Alice Hawthorne as a nail from the bomb penetrated her skull. The 44-year-old had brought her little daughter to the concert, who returned home motherless. A Turkish cameraman, ged 40, also died off a fatal heart attack after the blast, while 111 people were injured.

Despite the attack, the Games went on as planned, but an innocent security guard was charged with the crime. Eventually, Richard Jewell was exonerated, and Eric Robert Rudolph was found guilty of what turned out to be the first of four bombings. His motive? Here is the statement Rudolph gave to justify his act: “In the summer of 1996, the world converged upon Atlanta for the Olympic Games. Under the protection and auspices of the regime in Washington millions of people came to celebrate the ideals of global socialism. Multinational corporations spent billions of dollars, and Washington organized an army of security to protect these best of all games. Even though the conception and purpose of the so-called Olympic movement is to promote the values of global socialism, as perfectly expressed in the song Imagine by John Lennon, which was the theme of the 1996 Games even though the purpose of the Olympics is to promote these ideals, the purpose of the attack on July 27 was to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand.

Sri Lanka's new year marathon massacre in 2008

It was a marathon to celebrate the start of the Tamil new year, and it turned out to be a nightmare. A suicide bomber attacked at the start of the race, killing 15 athletes and injured 100 more. Jeyaraj Fernandopulle, the highway minister, army officer Lt Colonel Udayadeera, former Olympic marathon runner KA Karunaratne, and the national athletics coach Lakshman de Alwis were also among the casualties.

Togo team attacked during the Africa Cup of Nations in 2010

"I'm still under shock. I was one of those who carried the injured players into the hospital - that is when I realised what was really going on. All the players, everyone was crying, calling their mums, crying on the phone, saying their last words because they thought they'd be dead," former Arsenal and Manchester City striker Emmanuel Adebayor said after the incident.

The Togo national team were machine-gunned by rebels (Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda) of Angola's oil-rich territory of Cabinda while traveling from the Republic of Congo. These rebels had been fighting for the region's independence for a long time, and they warned that this was just the “start of a series of targeted actions that will continue in all the territory of Cabinda”.

The day France stood still, 2015

As panic grew inside the stadium, French and German supporters gathered on the pitch, before being evacuated by the police, and the players watched on from the tunnel. The German team stayed in the stadium the whole night, before flying back home the next morning. Time stood still that night, and so did football.

Al Qaeda threatens Dakar Rally in 2008

The race was scheduled to start in Portugal and end in Dakar, Senegal. However, eight of the 15 stages was set to take place in Mauritania, where a French family was slaughtered by Al Qaeda. The French government gave safety warnings to the organizers, who had reportedly also received direct threat from the terrorist cell. Eventually, the race was called off, for the first time in its history, before returning in South America next year.