The tragic story of Stroitel Pripyat, the football team that went missing with the Chernobyl explosion

On the morning of April 26, 1986, when the players of the FC Stroitel Pripyat were training for the semi-final of the Home Cup against the FC BorodyakaSuddenly, they were surprised that a few meters from them, on the same ground that was to be premiered a week later, a helicopter landed and interrupted them.

The engrossed players and technical director saw people descend with guards and radiation detectors who, upon hearing a ‘click’, warned the team that the game would not be played because an accident had occurred. at the “Lenin” Chernobyl nuclear power plant, a modern and progressive city 16 kilometers away almost on the border with Belarus in the days of the Soviet Union.

Like other cities around Chernobyl, Pripyat, founded in 1970, was built with a modern idea so that it was inhabited by workers and scientists with their respective families, albeit due to the fertility of the land , thanks to the river, many farmers also lived.

The factory started operating in 1977 and Prypiat expanded with hospitals, schools and sports centers. There was a cinema, a swimming pool, an amusement park and several towers for houses and in 1986 40,000 people lived there and so it is not surprising that in a country with a great football tradition like the USSR , in 1975, the FC was founded. Stroitel Pripyat (“FC Constructores Pripyat”), with the aim of forming an exclusive team of workers from the region, as the Twitter account recalled this weekend The line circuit breaker.

It was an amateur team, to distract themselves from so much work, which was encouraged by their relatives and the people of the city, and played in the second regional amateur division of the USSR -A sort of fifth national amateur category- faced teams from the Kiev oblast and even got the support of the director of the construction department, Vasily Kizima, who first said that he had the four working teams busy enough for them to play football, But then he changed his mind before so much emphasis (“Let them drink beer and rest and have fun playing football for a while”, they told him, as he recounted years later in an interview with the English magazine “Four Fout Two”).

In a short time, at FC Stroitel Pripyat, they realized that due to the results and the dynamics of activity in the city, they could face a stage of growth and They started to bring in experienced players, who were getting paid. They were presented as nuclear power plant workers, but they were sneaky professionals. Already in 1981, they came to hire as a coach Anatoly Shepel, former League and Cup champion with Dynamo Kiev, and not only to lead the team but also to coordinate youth training academies. Everything was fine.

They grew so much that in 1986 they were on their way to reach the third national (already professional) and reached the semi-final of the Local Cup and to the point that on May 1, on the occasion of Labor Day, it was already planned to inaugurate the new “Avangard” stadium with a capacity of 11,000 spectators in a covered stand, a cabin as a changing room and with an athletics track, located in the residential area. “The stadium was as important to the city as the reactor,” Kizima perhaps exaggerated.

The defender of the team, Alexander Vishnevsky He recalled that they almost always played in front of around 2,000 people who came to watch the games, but that “everyone loved football”. They played in a white shirt and blue pants and won the regional competition in 1981, 1982 and 1983, but they had bureaucratic issues with the league and were stuck in the fifth amateur.

However, everything was frustrated and even the Avangard stadium could not be premiered because five days ago, and when we were already talking about the construction of a fifth reactor, On April 26, the number four of the nuclear power plant exploded during a safety test with 31 dead (5 of them, FC Stroitel players), and they all had to evacuate the city where they never returned.

The FC Stroitel team moved to another town, Slavutych, 45 kilometers away, specially built after the accident to house evacuees and new maintenance, surveillance and investigation officers and took the name of the new city, but no longer the same spirit, neither project nor budget, which disappeared in 1988.

Valentin Litvin was the youngest player on the team, so much so that he was just in school when it all started. He had six brothers, all of them players, and they came from the village of Chistogalovka. “In ninth grade, I was supposed to play a game, but I was on the algebra test. Our teacher looked out the window and saw a bus full of adults sitting and the door open and asked “Who are you waiting for?” And it turns out that was me, ”he says humorously.

He graduated in 1978 and started working as an engineer in Chernobyl, but he charged a small allowance to play football, around 50 kopecs (around 4 euros today) for local matches and around 5 rubles (7 euros) for regional matches. Instead, those who were hired to play were called in “Winter bells” for, like the flowers, they came to play at the end of winter. Over time, he became a captain.

On April 25, 1986, Valentin had spent the night with his family in Yampol, several kilometers away. His wife was admitted to Prypiat Hospital for complications after the birth of their second child and they were taking care of the baby. He returned to practice at nine in the morning ahead of the semi-final against FC Borodyaka, but was arrested by police at the entrance to town, although he noticed that life was still there. even and that many people were not aware of the situation. accident (many only found out 36 hours later), and the sun was even out. When he went to the stadium he was told that the rival players had been stranded on the outskirts of Chernobyl so he decided to go to the team headquarters to see if the match was suspended and a member of the technical staff. told him about the helicopter landing on the ground. He went up to the terrace, and from there he saw the nuclear power plant and the smoke coming out of Reactor 4.

“The hardest part started there,” he recalls. I ran to the hospital to find my wife, who told me about what happened the night as doctors and staff ran desperately from place to place and more and more casualties were arriving. My wife couldn’t be unloaded so we organized a leak and walked out the downstairs window as some patients tried to see what was going on with the reactor standing on a hill and how materials were thrown into the destroyed reactor from a helicopter. We left Prypiat on a motorbike and among the empty buses waiting to evacuate people, but they didn’t start until noon on the 27th ”.

Unlike many of his teammates who went to FC Stroitel Slavutych, he ended up playing for FC Zarya Vladislavska in the town of Obukhov. But over time he had to return to Chernobyl as liquidator for recovery and cleanup. He was supposed to help decontaminate the basements of the power plant, but the radiation levels were so high he could barely withstand a few minutes of exposure, limited by a dosimeter and he also carried radiation cards. Around 600,000 people worked on the clean-up that may have saved Europe from becoming uninhabitable, although the process is not expected to end until 2065, although experts believe the exclusion zone will be contaminated for a long time to come. three thousand years.

One of the Chernobyl zone’s most renowned football evacuees was the goalscorer for Milan and Chelsea and current coach of the Ukrainian national team. Andriy Sevchenko, who was nine at the time and was already part of the academy of Dynamo Kiev, the main city of the Oblast. Along with three other boys, they were taken 400 kilometers south to a training ground on the Black Sea coast.

Less than a week after the accident, on May 2, Dynamo Kiev had to face Atlético Madrid in the European Cup Winners’ Cup final in Lyon. Well-known coach of the Soviets at the time, Valery Lobanovsky, later claimed that although his players – among whom were big stars of the time like Oleg Blokhin, Vasili Rats and Igor Belanov – were aware of the Chernobyl accident, they didn’t want to disturb them in these pre-workouts. They ended up winning this final 3-0.

Eduard Korotkov was one of those assigned to travel by helicopter for two hours over the damaged reactor each day that summer. The activity started after watching the World Cup soccer matches in Mexico at night, in which the USSR advanced to the round of 16, but were eliminated by Belgium 4-3 in a controversial game in León and despite Belanov’s three goals. This team also had Blokhin and Rats, and Lobanovsky as their coach, all from Dynamo. “Football was the only consolation for the people,” he said “Soviet sports“.

Today – says Valeriy Shkurdalov, who runs the Chernobyl Discovery Facebook page and works as a tourist guide in the Prypiat region, to “Four four two”- The Avangard Stadium is a tourist attraction, with rusty floodlights and the ground covered in trees in a radioactive ghost town, which is being reclaimed by nature.

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