In football there are sporting tragedies, economic tragedies and real tragedies, such as the Munich plane crash (1958) that left Manchester United without many of its best and most promising players, which ended the great team that Torino had. (1949), or the one that more recently (2016) suffered by the Brazilian Atlético Chapacoense. Also the one that deprived Zambia of its national team.
It was 1993 and the squad – the so-called copper bullets – traveled to Dakar for an important World Cup qualification match in the United States. But not on a commercial flight, and even less so charter, but on a twin-engine military plane, so old and with such limited autonomy that it had planned stops in Congo, Gabon and the Ivory Coast to refuel before reaching its destination. He never reached it.
Two minutes after refueling in Libreville, it fell into the Atlantic Ocean two kilometers from the coast, near Sablière beach, after the right engine caught fire and the pilot mistakenly turned off the left one, which was working (the report only became known a decade later). All thirty passengers died, including the coach and eighteen players. Gabonese army soldiers took charge of the search and were only able to recover twenty-four bodies. The victims were buried with full honors in the Lusaka Heroes Cemetery and their families, after a long legal battle, received compensation of four million euros to be distributed among everyone.
Zambia had a great team then, but was left without it overnight. From the ashes of his arose miraculously and with prodigious speed another one equally good or even better, who fell just short of the American World Cup and only a year after the incident reached the final of the African Cup of Nations.
Only footballers who played abroad were saved from death, such as captain Kalusha Bwalya, who played for PSV Eindhoven, and Charles Musonda from Anderlecht, who had commitments with their teams and were either not part of the squad. , or they traveled on their own from Europe. Not so lucky was striker Kelvin Mutale, who had scored fourteen goals in thirteen international matches (including a hat trick against Mauricio two days before), or goalkeeper David Chabala, father of four children and who was never able to meet the twins of the that his wife was pregnant. Now that is a tragedy.
Many times the team had complained about the insecurity and discomfort of the Buffalo model military planes in which they traveled. The previous year, on the way to a meeting in Madagascar, the aircraft had spent four hours detained at the Malawi airport, after refueling, due to a dispute over payment for fuel. And shortly after, flying over the Indian Ocean, the captain had asked over the loudspeakers that everyone put on their life jackets, without giving any further explanation. That’s how bad things were.
Zambia did not withdraw from any competition and found players to replace those missing. The Dane Roald Poulsen, who had won the league with Odense, received a call from none other than the country’s president asking him to take charge of the team “so that the deaths would not be in vain.” Sixty-seven after the accident, the copper bullets defeated Morocco 2-1. And nineteen years later they won the African Cup in Libreville, where he fell into the plane. They placed flowers, tears and the trophy on the sand of Sablière beach. The circle had closed.
