Chapecoense had risen from obscurity to make it to the Copa Sudamericana finals scheduled for Wednesday against Atletico Nacional of Colombia. (Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images)
Back in November 2016, a plane carrying Brazilian soccer players crashed shortly after takeoff in Medellin, Colombia, killing 71 people, including 19 players. (Three players miraculously survived.) It was a tremendous tragedy—but it wasn’t all that surprising. That’s because sports teams stepping onto doomed flights has been nightmarishly common since the 1940s. RealClearLife has curated a list of the worst ones below.
Torino Soccer Club (1949) – Twenty-two members of the Torino F.C. soccer team were killed when their plane hit the side a mountain. It’s been called “The Day Italian Football Died“; a reported 500,000 mourners showed up to the funeral in Turin. Read more about it here.
U.S. Figure Skating Team (1961) – All 16 members of the team were killed, when their plane crash-landed in Brussels, Belgium. The only survivor was a dog in the cargo hold. Read more about it here.
Marshall University Football Team (1970) – All 75 people on board, including all 38 members of the football team, perished. A biopic, We Are Marshall, starring Matthew McConaughey, was made about the team and its fate in 2006 (watch the trailer here). Read more about the disaster here.
Old Christians Rugby Club (1972) – The subject of a 1993 film Alive, the crash involved members of a Uruguayan rugby squad. Their plane ditched high in Argentina’s Andes Mountains, and miraculously, 16 passengers were rescued 72 days after the crash (they stayed alive by cannibalizing their frozen compatriots). Read more about it here.
University of Evansville Basketball Team (1977) – Twenty-nine people died, including 14 team members and its head coach. According to the Indianapolis Star, the same charter jet service had been used by the Indiana Pacers, Butler University’s basketball team, and Notre Dame’s. Read more about it here.
Peru’s Alianza Lima Soccer Team (1987) – The team’s coach and 16 of its players were killed when their Peruvian Navy charter crashed into the ocean. Read the haunting original report in The New York Times here.
Zambian National Soccer Team (1993) – Eighteen players and five officials died in the crash when their plane, headed for a World Cup qualifying match, crashed into the sea. Read the original report from the Los Angeles Times here.
Yaroslavl Lokomotiv Hockey Team (2011) – All but one of the 45 passengers on board survived, with 27 players killed, two coaches, and seven club officials. Its lone survivor, Alexander Sizov, in a translated interview from The Moscow Times, said: “On impact, everything started flying. Something hit me hard, that’s why my left side is all busted up….Once in the water, I honestly didn’t see or notice anything around—not the fires, not the plane, nothing.” (The “water” he mentions is a tributary of the Volga River.) Read more about it here.
Chapecoense Brazilian Soccer Team (2016) – In a positive twist to the tragedy, as of the new year, the soccer squad was looking to sign 20 new players and save jerseys for the surviving members of the team, in the hopes that they’d be healthy enough to hit the pitch in 2017. Read the original report from The Guardian here.
—RealClearLife Staff
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