Sports world mourns another in a line of doomed teams decimated by air-travel tragedy.
Only six of 81 survive as Brazilian charter is the latest sports-related air tragedy
They were living what many would consider a fantasy lifestyle: Young men on a charter plane, travelling together to play a boy’s game for money and glory and community pride.
But late on Monday night, in jungle not far from Medellin, Colombia, that fantasy lifestyle ended in brutal fate. A charter plane carrying 81 people, including members of Brazil’s Chapecoense soccer club, crashed. Reports said only six passengers survived, including three players, two crew members and a journalist.
The team, which had been enjoying a dream season and was en route to Bolivia to play one of the biggest games in its history, had been the talk of South America’s sports landscape. An underdog squad from a city of about 200,000, Chapecoense’s on-field story was described by Italian sports journalist Tancredi Palmieri as “a football fairy tale at its climax.”
As recently as 2009 the club had been a fourth-division afterthought. Last week they had advanced to the final of the Copa Sudamericana, a second-tier competition that’s a rough South American equivalent to the European soccer’s Europa League. In other words, they weren’t the best of the best. But they were good enough to play against the best. And victory in this championship would have gone a long way toward providing the belief that the future was limitless.
“Before boarding, they said they were seeking to turn their dream into reality,” Plinio David de Nes Filho, the club’s chairman of the board, told reporters in Tuesday’s grim light. “This morning, that dream is over.”
And so the sports world mourned another in a line of doomed teams decimated by air-travel tragedy. Five years ago it was Russia’s Locamotiv Yaroslavl hockey club, 37 members of which, including Canadian coach Brad McCrimmon, perished when their charter plane crashed shortly after takeoff en route to a season-opening match in Minsk. In 1993 Zambia’s national soccer team was mostly lost in a crash in Gabon, this a handful of years after Peruvian first-division team Alianza Lima lost 16 players and a coach in another catastrophe. In 1970, West Virginia’s Marshall University football team lost 37 members in an instant. In 1958, Manchester United lost eight players after an ill-fated takeoff attempt on a slushy runway in what became known as the Munich air disaster.
The comprehensive list of such loss, of course, is longer.
High-profile catastrophes have a way of fuelling the fear of flying, even if air travel remains a remarkably safe mode of transport compared to popular alternatives.
But when you think about the millions upon millions of air miles that have been travelled through the decades in the name of global sporting pursuits, it seems remarkably and mercifully short.
That’s not to say that the prospect of a sporting dream turning into a fiery, plummeting nightmare hasn’t kept many a sportsperson awake at night. The ranks of athletes who’ve grappled with a fear of flying include boxing great Muhammad Ali, NFL coach turned broadcaster John Madden, former Maple Leafs Rick Vaive and Jeff O’Neill, current Leaf Tyler Bozak and hockey icon Wayne Gretzky.
David Ropeik, the author of the book How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match The Facts, said high-profile catastrophes have a way of fuelling the fear of flying, even if air travel remains a remarkably safe mode of transport compared to popular alternatives
“There’ll be a lot of people who are freaked out about plane crashes now and think about not flying. But they’ll get in their car and text and drive, even though (texting and driving is) way ahead of air travel in terms of behaviours you don’t want to do if you want to stay alive,” Ropeik said on Tuesday. “And that’s just one example. There’ll be a lot of people who’ll be freaked out about plane crashes who won’t worry about putting on sunscreen when they go outside. And skin cancer’s way more likely to harm you than a plane crash, overall, taking the general average numbers.”
In the early 1980s, when Gretzky was near the height of his recordshattering powers as history’s great- est scoring machine, the Great One made headlines by musing about taking an early retirement in acknowledgement of the severe anxiety he experienced on planes. Gretzky chalked up his fears to the nu- merous close calls he had witnessed on takeoffs and landings going back to his days as a junior in Sault Ste. Marie. He’d once been on a plane that clipped treetops in heavy fog. As he wrote in his 1990 autobiogra- phy, his phobia was bad enough that “one time flying in from Quebec City, they had to physically lie on me to calm me down.” Gretzky would later explain his anxieties were eased somewhat after he was offered a seat in a cockpit. A pilot explaining the function of various gauges and switches removed some of the dastardly mystery from the nerve-jangling process.
Toronto has known its air tragedies, to be sure. The Maple Leafs’ No. 5 that hangs from the rafters at the Air Canada is for Bill Barilko, the star defenceman who died when the small plane in which he’d embarked on an off-season fishing trip was lost in the wilds of Northern Ontario in the days after he scored the Stanley Cup winner in 1951. In 2006, former Blue Jays pitcher Cory Lidle died alongside a flight instructor after the small plane in which they were travelling crashed into a New York City apartment building.
On Tuesday, Toronto FC sent out “thoughts and prayers” via Twitter to the stricken club a continent away. Spanish giants Barcelona and Real Madrid held moments of silence before their training sessions. France’s top teams promised similar tributes. Chapecoense’s acting president vowed to rebuild the team: “The dream is not over. We will fight back when it’s time.” As Brazilian soccer great Pele pronounced the crash “a tragic loss,” a sport’s spiritual homeland mourned the loss of a Cinderella, a team that defied the odds even at its tragic end.