Like Ulrike Meyfarth, for example.
On September 4, 1972, she celebrated her first major triumph at the age of just 16: the teenager from Wesseling won the Olympic gold medal in the high jump and set a world record at the same time.
But one event overshadowed her success: the terrorist attack in Munich.
The "happy games" turned into a nightmare.
Filmmaker Nicole Kraack has tracked down contemporary witnesses who describe moments that completely changed their lives - for example Ralf Hammerschmidt from Krefeld.
In 1972, a television series was launched that ventured into galaxies that no one had ever seen before - "Starship Enterprise"!
Ralf Hammerschmidt sat in front of the screen on May 27, 1972.
Since then, the science fiction series has never let him go.
For him, everything revolves around "Star Trek", the original title of the cult series.
In 2015, he founded a fan club and now regularly organizes Trek dinners, often in typical series attire.
But 1972 had even more highs to offer: Juliane Werding from Essen, still a schoolgirl at the time, made it into the German charts with a song about drug-related deaths.
And a giant weighing several tons went into operation in the Eifel region: With the Effelsberg radio telescope, NRW set global standards in space research in 1972.
Thanks to the giant, NRW also grew in size!
During this time, Aachen University was working on an electric car.
And in the arch-conservative, Catholic city of Münster, of all places, the first demonstration of homosexuals in Germany took to the streets.
NRW also celebrated record profits in the Westphalian Silicon Valley - in Paderborn.
And the Cologne writer Heinrich Böll was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature!
First broadcast: Friday, August 25, 2017 at 8:15 p.m. on WDR