David Miller, who has died aged 91, was one of the great figures of British sports journalism, although his finest hour as a reporter had little to do with sport, and his scoop was never published.

Miller was working for The Daily Telegraph covering the 1972 Munich Olympics when on the morning of 5 September eight terrorists from the Black September Movement broke into the athletes’ village, killed two members of the Israel team, and held nine more hostage.

Attempting to dispel memories of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, security in Munich was deliberately loose. Even after the hostage-taking, Miller was able to gain access to the village by pretending to sunbathe and then rolling off his lounger and going under the perimeter fence and into the parkland that led to the village.

There, he found many Olympians unconcerned about the fate of the Israeli competitors, some of whom were being paraded on a balcony above. An attempt to rescue the hostages when they were transferred by helicopter to a military air base at Fürstenfeldbruck for a flight to Cairo, was initially hailed as a complete success.

At one in the morning Miller found himself alone at the Olympic media centre, where he found “just a lonely, scared secretary” who said that fighting was still going on at the airbase. Realising that the rescue attempt had been botched – all nine hostages and five terrorists plus a West German policeman had been killed – Miller phoned the Telegraph to alert them. However, the night editor told him he would go with the agency reports of a successful rescue because Miller had no quotes with which to back his story.

He was born on March 1 1935; his father Wilfred, was an actor, his mother was Everilda, née Milne-Redhead. Wilfred had no interest in football, but his son was entranced by meeting the Charlton defender, George Smith, when he paid a visit to David’s primary school in London.

Miller played football for Charterhouse, Cambridge University and Corinthian Casuals. Had the 1956 Games been held somewhere other than Melbourne, David Miller might have become an Olympian himself. He was included in the Great Britain football squad for Melbourne but missed out when the squad was cut to reduce travel expenses.

After leaving Peterhouse College, where he had studied natural sciences, Miller joined The Times as a sub-editor, responsible for compiling the first-class cricket scores. He described the offices in Printing House Square as: “A mass of dark corridors, high-ceilinged Victorian rooms with open coke fires and afternoon tea, cream buns optional.”

Having paid his own expenses to cover the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, where he lived on a frugal diet “largely of milk and biscuits”, Miller joined The Daily Telegraph and in 1961 transferred to the newly launched Sunday Telegraph. He travelled to the Tokyo Olympics on the Trans-Siberian Express, and wrote the match report for the 1966 World Cup final.

Miller was the only sports journalist still in Bogotá when the Colombian authorities announced that the England captain, Bobby Moore, had been arrested for stealing a bracelet from a jewellery shop.

The rest of the press pack, some of whom would not alert their offices out of respect for Moore, had already flown on to Ecuador for the next warm-up game for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. Miller filed his report at six in the morning using the hotel telex.

He joined the Daily Express in 1973 but, although he had licence to report on any event he chose, it was not an experience Miller particularly enjoyed: the Express’s position as Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper was collapsing. From 3.3 million a day when he joined, its circulation had slumped to 1.3 million when he returned to The Times as chief sports correspondent in 1982. Miller ruefully reflected that in those nine years he had worked under six editors.

It says something for the breadth and longevity of Miller’s sportswriting that he should have seen both Stanley Matthews and Lionel Messi play and covered 50 Wimbledon championships.

It was, however, with the Olympic Games that his name was most closely associated. He wrote two books with Sebastian Coe, who hosted a reception at the House of Lords in 2008 to mark Miller’s 50 years in sports writing. Miller had by then rejoined The Daily Telegraph as a columnist. He became the official historian of the International Olympic Committee and his 700-page study of the Olympic movement, From Athens to Athens, coincided with the return of the Games to its birthplace in Greece.

Presenting Miller with the Pierre de Coubertin medal for services to the Olympic movement in 2023, the IOC president, Thomas Bach, said: “Your writing ultimately served a higher purpose than to simply inform people of the latest scores or results.”

He married Marita Malyon in 1957; she died in 2018. They had a daughter, who died in 2024, and a son, who survives him.