THE FOOTBALL TEAM DESTROYED BY THE CHERNOBYL DISASTER
“I COULD SEE THE NUCLEAR POWER PLANT AND THE SMOKE RISING ABOVE THE RUINS”
On the morning of Saturday April 26, 1986, a helicopter landed on a football pitch in northern Ukraine. Players from FC Pripyat were preparing for a big cup semi-final against FC Borodyanka later that afternoon. They watched as men wearing protective suits and carrying radiation detectors clambered out of the helicopter. As the detectors clicked with audible warnings, the men informed the footballers that the match would not be played. There had been an incident at the nearby Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, also known as Chernobyl.
Pripyat was a commuter town located a couple of miles from the nuclear power plant and around 10 miles from the city of Chernobyl. Founded in 1970, Pripyat was a modern and progressive “atom town”, designed to represent the best of the Soviet Union – the now-defunct state that encompassed 15 republics including Russia and Ukraine. Pripyat had a cinema, swimming pool, amusement park and several tower blocks that housed a population of around 50,000. It also had a football team called FC Stroitel Pripyat.
‘Stroitel’ means builder. The team was
