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The showpiece final of this summer’s European Championship, likely to attract a worldwide television audience in excess of 300 million people, will be played on July 14 at the Olympiastadion in Berlin — a stadium originally built and funded on the orders of Europe’s most notorious dictator, Adolf Hitler.
Eighty-eight years have passed since the 1936 summer Olympic Games were also staged there, three years after Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, became the country’s chancellor and ruler.
These days, it’s a 74,000-seat stadium with a sleek, modern roof, but the setting stands as a testament to a blood-soaked history.
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Since then, we have seen Zidane’s headbutt in the final of the 2006 World Cup, and Bolt’s record-breaking feats in the 2009 World Championships — which also happened to be the same competition in which South Africa’s Caster Semenya, then only 18 years old, won the women’s 800m race, which subsequently became one of the defining talking points of the sport over the following decade due to a gender controversy.
Back to football, and Jurgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund memorably beat Bayern Munich in the German Cup final here in 2012, while Messi and Luis Suarez, then of Barcelona, defeated Paul Pogba and Andrea Pirlo’s Juventus three years later.
The past is forever etched into history, but over the coming month, a new tapestry will be woven into Europe’s most contentious sporting venue.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: John Bradford)
(1936 | 2024 Illustration: ullstein bild via Getty Images, Inaki Esnaola/Getty Images)
(Additional Photos:ullstein bild via Getty Images)