Today, Pripyat’s never-used Avangard Stadium stands as an unusual
tourist attraction, the floodlights rusted and pitch overgrown, inside
a radioactive ghost city being reclaimed by nature. Valeriy Shkurdalov
runs the Discover Chernobyl Facebook page and works as a tour guide
in Pripyat and the exclusion zone.
“The stadium is often visited by tourists,” he tells FFT, “although the
field is covered by trees.” One visitor Shkurdalov took into the exclusion
zone was Valentin Litvin, now a pensioner but still playing football and
refereeing locally. It was the first time he had been back to Pripyat.
The Chernobyl clean-up project is scheduled to finish in 2065 and
experts believe the
exclusion zone will
be contaminated
for another 3,000
years. No one’s
going to be playing
football in Pripyat
any time soon.According to Soviet Sport, in the aftermath of the disaster, “football
was the only comfort for the people”.
The Soviet side in Mexico included Dynamo Kiev triumverate Blokhin,
Rats and Belanov and was led by Dynamo boss Lobanovsky, who again
tried to play down an event that remained shrouded in Soviet secrecy.
“I think our government has given out all the facts to reporters about
what really happened, after the campaign spread by the international
press,” he said. After thumping Hungary 6-0 and topping their group,
the Soviets lost 4-3 after extra time to Belgium in the last 16, despite
a Belanov hat-trick in Leon.
FC Slavutych, the successor to FC Pripyat, had a short-lived existence.
The new outfit competed in the amateur league in 1987 and 1988,
but then disbanded.
Players and fans had been dispersed all over the region, and many
were preoccupied with the liquidation of Chernobyl. A large number
of people from Pripyat and the exclusion zone became sick and died,
and while the official Soviet death toll from the accident is 31, other
estimates place the figure significantly higher.Above Then and now:
Pripyat’s never-used
stadium now acts an
eerie tourist hotspot
PAUL BROWN
is a regular contributor to
FourFourTwo and author
of ‘Savage Enthusiasm –
A History of Football Fans’FourFourTwo September 2019 53CHERn OBYL
FC