Football’s Chernobyl fallout
How the nuclear disaster meant an abrupt end for FC Pripyat
On the morning of Saturday April 26, 1986, a helicopter landed on a football pitch in northern Ukraine. Players from FC Pripyat were preparing for a big cup semi-final against FC Borodyanka later that afternoon. They watched as men wearing protective suits and carrying radiation detectors clambered out of the helicopter. As the detectors clicked with audible warnings, the men informed the footballers that the match would not be played. There had been an incident at the nearby Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, also known as Chernobyl. Pripyat was a commuter town located a couple of miles from the nuclear power plant and around 10 miles from the city of Chernobyl. Founded in 1970, Pripyat was a modern and progressive “atom town”, designed to represent the best of the Soviet Union – the now-defunct state that encompassed 15 republics including Russia and Ukraine. Pripyat had a cinema, swimming pool, amusement park and several tower blocks that housed a population of around 50,000. It also had a football team called FC Stroitel Pripyat.
‘Stroitel’ means builder. The team was formed by men working on the construction of the Chernobyl plant and town of Pripyat, with the support of Vasily Kizima, the director of construction. Sport played an
“I COULD SEE THE NUCLEAR POWER PLANT AND THE SMOKE RISING ABOVE THE RUINS”
important role in Soviet society and was incorporated by the state into the daily lives of its citizens. “I have people working in four shifts, and there’s no place for them to go and rest,” explained Kizima. “Let them go and watch some football and drink some beer.”
Pripyat’s’s modest ground stood in the shadows of the residential blocks. The pitch was surrounded by a running track, with a hut for a dressing room and a small wooden stand. The stadium was often full of spectators, even with the club in the amateur fifth tier of the Soviet football league system. “In Pripyat, everyone loved football,” defender Alexander Vishnevsky told Soviet Sport. “Two thousand of them came to watch.” Visible in the distance beyond the boundary fence was the 500ft-high chimney stack of Chernobyl’s Reactor No.4.
Chernobyl opened in 1977 and Pripyat became a works team as a result. The side’s youngest player, Valentin Litvin, didn’t yet work at the plant as he was still at school. One of six brothers – all of them decent players – he was born in the nearby village of Chistogalovka and studied in Pripyat.
“I remember one episode in the ninth grade,” says Litvin, speaking to Valeriy Shkurdalov of Discover Chernobyl. “I was taking an algebra exam, and I was supposed to play in a game. Our teacher looked out the window and said, ‘Who are they waiting for?’ There was a bus and the team was waiting for me, all of them grown men.”
In 1978, after graduating from school, Litvin began working as an engineer at Chernobyl. Like most Pripyat players, he was paid a small football allowance – two roubles and 50 kopecks (worth about £3.25 today) for district games and five roubles (£6.50) for regional matches – on top of his power plant wage. But some of his team-mates were ringers, brought in from around the region specifically to play football.
“These were called ‘snowdrops’,” says Litvin. They were named this because, like the flowers, they arrived late in winter. “They received salaries from the power plant and were listed on the payroll, but they didn’t do any work.”
Backed by the power plant, and with snowdrops among their ranks, Pripyat pushed for promotion to the professional fourth tier. In 1981, they appointed former USSR striker Anatoliy Shepel, a league and cup winner with Dynamo Kiev, as manager. “That was the moment when our team began to take shape,” says Litvin, who became the captain. Pripyat, playing in white shirts and blue shorts, won the regional cup competition in 1981, 1982 and 1983, but struggled in the league and remained stuck in the fifth tier.
In 1986, the club built a new ground, the Avangard Stadium, with better facilities, floodlights and a large covered stand. Once finished, it would hold 11,000 fans. At the time, the authorities were planning to build a fifth reactor at Chernobyl. “The stadium is as important for the city as the reactor,” stated Vasily Kizima. The ground was due to officially open on May 1, 1986 but before that, Pripyat were scheduled to play a cup semi-final against Borodyanka on April 26.
At 1.23am that morning, Chernobyl’s No.4 nuclear reactor exploded. People in Pripyat saw a flash and heard a bang. A raging fire could be seen through the darkness, and firefighters were dispatched.
This was not the first incident at Chernobyl (a partial core meltdown had occurred in 1982) and it was assumed that it would soon be over. The locals stood outside to watch the fire as ash dropped from the sky. After sunrise, with the fire dampened, residents got on with their lives. They went shopping, made preparations for the May Day parade, and headed to the football ground for the big match.
Valentin Litvin had spent the night with family in Yampol, several miles away. His wife was in hospital in Pripyat due to complications following the birth of their second child, and the family was looking after the baby. He returned to Pripyat for training at 9am and was stopped by police at the entrance to the town. “I asked them what had happened, but they didn’t know anything,” he says. “So I crossed the bridge and went to the stadium.”
The sun was shining, and Litvin recalls seeing people strolling past with their children. A street vendor was selling vegetables. They were unaware Chernobyl had experienced the worst accident in the history of nuclear power. The only real indication that something was wrong was the sight of slow-moving vehicles from the plant, spraying roads with decontaminant. Pripyat would not be evacuated for 36 hours.
At the stadium, Litvin met the other players and coaches, who told him Borodyanka’s squad had been stopped well outside of Chernobyl. So Litvin went to the team headquarters to find out if the match was off. The headquarters were located in a nine-story tower block. Shortly after he got there, one of the coaches turned up and told Litvin about the helicopter landing on the pitch, and Litvin went up onto the roof. “I could see the nuclear power plant,” he says, “and the smoke rising above the ruins of Reactor No.4.”
Litvin’s thoughts switched from football to his wife. He rushed over to the hospital, where she told him what had happened the previous night. “Of course, she had not seen everything,” he explains. “There was noise, fuss, doctors running across the building looking for infusion sets, which they were short of, and victims arriving one after another.”
His wife couldn’t be discharged, so “we had to stage an escape” and Litvin helped her climb out through a ground floor window. “We saw patients from the hospital standing on a hill, where they had a good view of the plant and could watch as helicopters dropped materials into the destroyed reactor.”
The pair left Pripyat on a motorcycle, passing long queues of empty buses. “They were waiting for the command to come into town and
“THE 1986 WORLD CUP WAS On, SO PEOPLE TALKED A LOT ABOUT SOCCER. In THE AFTERMATH OF THE DISASTER, FOOTBALL WAS THE ONLY COMFORT”