Soccer team and coach break public silence

CHIANG RAI, THAILAND — With a routine of digging, breaks for water and meditation, a group of young Thai soccer players and their coach stayed alive while trapped in a flooded cave without any food for nine days before they were found by two British divers in a remarkable search-and-rescue operation that gripped the world.

In their first public appearance since their daring and almost improbable rescue, the players emerged in their team uniforms, holding soccer balls and dribbling them in a show of health and good spirits before detailing their weeks-long ordeal. In a news conference fashioned like a talk show, they introduced themselves and smiled and bowed before television cameras.

And they recounted the most harrowing moments of their adventure gone wrong.

The 12 boys persuaded their 25-year-old assistant coach, Ekapol Chanthawong, to bring them on a short trip into the vast Tham Luang cave system after practice on June 23. They had no food with them, Ekapol said, and planned to stay there for just an hour and be home before nightfall. One of the boys had to get back for a lesson with a private tutor, and another had a birthday celebration awaiting him.

Some of them were familiar with the cave’s vast rock fields and crevices and had gone far into its passageways before. But for others, this was their first trip. None of the boys had even told their parents of their plans.

When they arrived, water from seasonal monsoon rains had already begun pooling just beyond the cave’s mouth. Ekapol asked the boys whether they still wanted to continue with their plan, and they did. They went farther in — to a point where the boys would have to swim to continue any deeper inside the cave network, the coach said.

They had planned to keep exploring, but they realized it was getting late and turned back, hoping to get out the way they came in. They found that the floodwaters had blocked their exit.

Ekapol tried out their only escape path. He told the elder boys to hold on to a guide rope and ventured deep into the water. If they felt a command — two tugs — it meant he was stuck and needed to be pulled out.

“I walked inside that hole of water,” he said. “It felt like there was just stone all above me, and only sand under my feet.” He tugged twice, and the boys pulled him out.

“I told them we couldn’t get out that way and had to find a new way,” he recounted.

The team found shelter instead, prayed before sleeping that night and hoped the water levels would drop enough for them to swim out the next day. Ekapol, the only adult among them, said he was sure there would be a way out then. The boys’ reactions ranged from panic to guilt to optimism, he said.

That was the first of nine days that the soccer players and their coach had to go without food, trapped in the cave system in a lush mountain range in northern Thailand. As the hours passed, they lost sense of how long they had been in the cave’s dark chambers. Faced with a group of hungry, weakening boys, Ekapol urged them to drink water to keep full and to try to dig holes out through the cave with rocks, so that they had a sense of purpose.