Peter Beardsley’s chicken wrap
Bob Mortimer and Andy Dawson on their podcast Athletico Mince
start the evacuation,” says Litvin. “The background radiation level was already very high. The buses didn’t arrive until noon the following day, April 27.”
The Soviet Union tried to keep the accident at Chernobyl a secret, even from its citizens. “The information, apart from being unavailable, was unbelievable,” continues Litvin. “I, like many others, believed the reactor simply could not explode.”
The outside world eventually heard about the accident on April 28, when high radiation levels were detected 800 miles away in Sweden.
The Chernobyl disaster released at least 400 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bomb. A 19-mile exclusion zone was set up around the plant and the people of Pripyat were never allowed to return to their homes, with many relocated around 30 miles away to the town of Slavutych.
Several Pripyat players, including Alexander Vishnevsky, set up a new club called FC Stroitel Slavutych. Valentin Litvin ended up in Obukhov and began playing for FC Zarya Vladislavka.
Another evacuated footballer was future Milan and Chelsea striker Andriy Shevchenko, then a nine-year-old at Dynamo Kiev’s academy. Kiev was the nearest major city to Chernobyl, so Shevchenko and the rest of the kids were taken 250 miles south to a training camp on the Black Sea coast. Despite everything, football continued.
On May 2, less than a week after the accident, Dynamo Kiev played Atletico Madrid in the European Cup Winners’ Cup final in Lyon. “As far as the events of Chernobyl go,” Dynamo coach Valeriy Lobanovsky told the press, “my players were aware of it but not disturbed in their preparation for the match.” Dynamo, with a side including Soviet stars Oleg Blokhin, Vasili Rats and Igor Belanov, beat Atletico 3-0. Back at Chernobyl, there was a lot of important work to be done. Both Alexander Vishnevsky and Valentin Litvin acted as ‘liquidators’ during the recovery and clean-up operation. Litvin helped decontaminate the power plant’s basements, where high radiation levels allowed only a few minutes of exposure, and deadly pieces of graphite from the exploded reactor core fell from the roof above. The liquidators carried radiation maps and dosimeters to limit their exposure, but Litvin says they often had to exceed safety limits to get the job done.
Around 600,000 men and women were involved in the clean-up, which was brave and dangerous work that ultimately saved much of Europe from becoming uninhabitable. One liquidator, helicopter pilot Eduard Korotkov, recalled circling over the damaged reactor for two hours each day that summer, then watching football on television at night. “The World Cup was on,” he revealed in oral history book Chernobyl Prayer, “so we talked a lot about soccer.”
“THE SUN WAS SHINING AND PEOPLE WERE STROLLING ALONG WITH KIDS, UNAWARE CHERNOBYL HAD EXPERIENCED THE WORST ACCIDENT In NUCLEAR POWER HISTORY”
According to Soviet Sport, in the aftermath of the disaster, “football was the only comfort for the people”.
The Soviet side in Mexico included Dynamo Kiev triumverate Blokhin, Rats and Belanov and was led by Dynamo boss Lobanovsky, who again tried to play down an event that remained shrouded in Soviet secrecy. “I think our government has given out all the facts to reporters about what really happened, after the campaign spread by the international press,” he said. After thumping Hungary 6-0 and topping their group, the Soviets lost 4-3 after extra time to Belgium in the last 16, despite a Belanov hat-trick in Leon.
FC Slavutych, the successor to FC Pripyat, had a short-lived existence. The new outfit competed in the amateur league in 1987 and 1988, but then disbanded.
Players and fans had been dispersed all over the region, and many were preoccupied with the liquidation of Chernobyl. A large number of people from Pripyat and the exclusion zone became sick and died, and while the official Soviet death toll from the accident is 31, other estimates place the figure significantly higher.
Today, Pripyat’s never-used Avangard Stadium stands as an unusual tourist attraction, the floodlights rusted and pitch overgrown, inside a radioactive ghost city being reclaimed by nature. Valeriy Shkurdalov runs the Discover Chernobyl Facebook page and works as a tour guide in Pripyat and the exclusion zone.
“The stadium is often visited by tourists,” he tells FFT, “although the field is covered by trees.” One visitor Shkurdalov took into the exclusion zone was Valentin Litvin, now a pensioner but still playing football and refereeing locally. It was the first time he had been back to Pripyat.
The Chernobyl clean-up project is scheduled to finish in 2065 and experts believe the exclusion zone will be contaminated for another 3,000 years. No one’s going to be playing football in Pripyat any time soon.