The final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup was just six days away, when the disaster happened. Just 70 miles north of Kyiv, a huge reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had exploded, filling the night sky with radioactive particles. Nowhere in the vicinity was safe – not even Ukraine’s biggest city.
As the Soviet Union hurried into damage limitation mode, 100,000 children were evacuated for their own safety. Among them was a nine-year-old Dynamo Kyiv junior by the name of Andriy Shevchenko, whisked 500 miles by bus to sanctuary by the Sea of Azov, on Ukraine’s south coast.
First, Shevchenko’s club faced one of the biggest matches of their history, at Lyon’s Stade de Gerland against Atletico Madrid. While chaos reigned back home, Dynamo put on a masterclass, dismantling Los Colchoneros in a 3-0 triumph. Goalscorer Oleh Blokhin was already a Ballon d’Or winner; months later, strike partner Ihor Belanov would lift the award as well.
Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv were hailed as the finest team in the history of Eastern Europe. Not for the first time, Ukraine’s most successful club had battled adversity on the path to greatness.
THE DEATH MATCH
Escape To Victory wasn’t just a fictional account of prisoners of war taking on the Germans in a football match during the Second World War – the 1981 movie was inspired by a real story, with a much less Hollywood-friendly ending.
Founded by the new Soviet Union’s Dynamo sports society in 1927, Dynamo Kyiv had been in existence for little more than a decade when war broke out. After Kyiv replaced Kharkiv as the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1934, the new club had become Ukraine’s only representative in the first ever season of the Soviet Top League in 1936, finishing second behind Dynamo Moscow.
Their emergence came during highly troubled times under Joseph Stalin, however: almost four
