Soccer
Impossible To Believe
Pro teams travel from City to City to play the sport they love and everyone expects them to arrive and return safe, but we hear horror stories and one surfaced again today.
Today’s tragic loss is for the Brazilian Football Club who were on route to probably the biggest matches in the history of the club.
The aircraft, which departed from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, was carrying the Chapecoense soccer team from southern Brazil for Wednesday’s first leg of the two-game Copa Sudamericana final against Atletico Nacional of Medellin.
It’s reported that there were also twenty-one (21) Brazilian journalists were also on board the flight.
It’s reported that the total number who had been on board was down sized to 77, which is horrific for the Families, the Country and the sporting world.
The British Aerospace 146 short-haul plane declared an emergency at 10pm (local time) apparently due to an electrical failure on board.
Brazil’s top teams offered to loan the small club players next season so they can rebuild following the sudden end to a fairy tale season that saw Chapecoense reach the tournament final just two years after making it into the first division for the first time since the 1970s.
“It is the minimum gesture of solidarity that is within our reach,” the teams said in a statement.
Sportsmanship took centre state with Atletico Nacional asking that the championship title be given to its rival, whose upstart run had electrified soccer-crazed Brazil.
Rescuers working through the night were initially heartened after pulling three people alive from the wreckage, but as the hours passed, heavy fog and stormy weather grounded helicopters and slowed efforts to reach the crash site.
In the early morning hours there were photo’s of dozens of bodies scattered across a muddy mountainside that were collected into white bags.
They were loaded onto several Black Hawk helicopters that had to perform a tricky maneuver to land on the crest of the Andes mountains.
The plane’s fuselage appeared to have broken into two, with the nose facing downward into a steep valley.
The team is so modest that tournament organizers ruled that its 22,000-seat arena was too small to host the final match, which was moved to a stadium 300 miles (480 kilometers) to the north, in the city of Curitiba.
The team won the hearts of fans throughout Brazil with its impressive run to the finals, with some fans taking up a campaign (online) to move the final match to Rio de Janeiro’s iconic Maracana stadium, where the 2014 World Cup finals were played.
Thoughts to the Families!!