Active Stocks
Tue Mar 19 2024 11:41:02
  1. Tata Consultancy Services share price
  2. 4,018.35 -3.05%
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 147.85 -1.17%
  1. Bharti Airtel share price
  2. 1,231.85 0.56%
  1. Power Grid Corporation Of India share price
  2. 260.90 -1.55%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 409.85 -1.81%
Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  When death strikes, on the way to the final
BackBack

When death strikes, on the way to the final

The tragedy that befell Chapecoense illustrates that there is something about the deaths of athletes that particularly touches us

Photo: APPremium
Photo: AP

It was when the cricketer Phil Hughes died two years ago that I first began thinking about the themes in this column. Is there something about sudden deaths of athletes that particularly touches us? I don’t know. But just as with his death during a match in Australia, I haven’t been able to get last week’s incomprehensible tragedy in Colombia out of my mind.

What’s there to say about it, really? I mean, of course, any accident like this is incomprehensible and tragic. Still, here was this football team, Chapecoense, from a small southern Brazilian town called Chapeco. It probably embodied the aspirations of that community like teams from other small towns often do. Over two years, they had played their way up the league ranks, beating an Argentine team in the semi-final of the Copa Sudamericana.

That evening, they celebrated wildly—as a now heartbreaking video shows us—in their locker room. For they knew they were on their way to the final, to be played in Medellin, Colombia. They would play a Colombian team, Atletico Nacional. Another now heartbreaking video shows the team in the plane, actually on the way to the final, chatting and laughing as any other set of excited young men in the primes of their lives might do.

And on their way to the final, accompanied by journalists and fans, their plane crashed into the side of a mountain. Almost everyone in the Chapecoense team was killed, along with dozens more passengers.

There is a still more heartbreaking image of that same locker room. Only, it’s now empty except for three young men from the team who did not make the trip, sitting there in stunned desolation.

***

I imagine many people around the world reached this week for their copies of Alive, by Piers Paul Read. It tells the story, uncannily similar to the Chapecoense tragedy, of an October 1972 disaster. 

A Uruguayan rugby team, along with families and fans, was flying to Santiago, Chile, to play a match there. Their plane crashed into a mountain high in the Andes, on the border between Argentina and Chile. Eleven from the team, and 18 others, died either instantly or in the following days. That includes eight killed by an avalanche several days after the crash. Rescue efforts, unable to find any trace of the plane, were called off after eight days. 

Two months later, three of the survivors decided to trek out of the mountains in search of help. One returned after a couple of days, because they realized they didn’t have enough food for all three men. After walking for five more days, the other two ran into a Chilean cowhand. The other 14 survivors were rescued just before Christmas.

It’s a remarkable story, and Read tells it in a straightforward, no-frills style that only heightens the impact of the tragedy, of what the survivors went through to live and then seek help. And there’s a certain significance, too, to my mention above of Christmas.

There was nearly no food on the plane when it went down: just a little chocolate, biscuits and wine. Even strictly rationed, it went quickly. The survivors tried eating leather torn from luggage, even the contents of the seat cushions. All futile, of course. Eventually they were forced to face up to a terrible decision: if they wanted to live, their only option was to eat the flesh of their dead co-passengers.

If that was hard enough to come to terms with, it was complicated by their religious convictions. How would they square cannibalism with the Catholic faith most of them professed? The answer: the need to stay alive overcame doubts. 

Some of the survivors even came to think of eating their compatriots’ flesh as the taking of Holy Communion. Traumatic as it must have been to conceive of and then do, this is why they survived, and in reasonable health given that they spent over two months in snow and ice, some nursing serious injuries.

It must have been some Christmas for these men, that year.

***

One of these calamities turned into a story of survival against nearly insuperable odds. After their rescue, and particularly after Read’s book appeared, several survivors of the 1972 crash became instant heroes and have had successful careers in various fields. Several have also gone around the world speaking about their experience on the mountain. 

Inevitably perhaps, they have become motivational speakers: telling audiences what they learned on the mountain about leadership and change, challenge and fear and the benefits of teamwork.

And yet, what happened on that flight and that mountain haunts them, and us, to this day.

What happened last week remains an unmitigated tragedy. Six people survived the crash, but entirely by chance. There is no story here, like in 1972, of heroic survival. Nearly the entire team was lost. Already there are signals of empathy and solidarity in sorrow from other clubs. Atletico Nacional asked that Chapecoense be declared the winner of the final, and thus of the Copa Sudamericana. 

Some Brazilian teams have offered to loan players to Chapecoense so they can field a team next season. Fans filled Chapecoense’s home stadium in Brazil—as also the stadium in Medellin where the Copa final was to be played—to mourn the athletes so cruelly snatched away.

What must this devastating loss do to these fans, to the players left behind, to a small town, to a nation that so loves the sport? To us all? Again, is there something about sudden deaths of athletes that particularly touches us?

Maybe there is, after all. Maybe we are so accustomed to seeing these men and women as our heroes that when death lashes out at them from thin air, as it sometimes does to us, we feel it in our very soul.

We feel it as if they were our own flesh and blood.

Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His latest book is Jukebox Mathemagic: Always One More Dance.

His Twitter handle is @DeathEndsFun

Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
More Less
Published: 03 Dec 2016, 11:22 PM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App