The memory of the man who carried Diego Maradona on a litter in 86: 'I picked you up and you took me to eternity'

Mariano gavira

11/25/2020 7:27 PM

• Clarín.com

• sports

Updated 11/25/2020 7:52 PM

Roberto Cejas's voice breaks as soon as he picks up his cell phone and says "hello."

He says that a while ago he turned off the television, that he does not want to listen to anything else.

Nor read news.

Nor do he see photos, because he says, of course, that in each review of images made by the media he sees himself there, with Diego Maradona

Roberto

The photos from that moment are now an icon.

That is why Roberto does not stop receiving messages and attends to

from the silence of the kitchen in his house in Santa Fe, where he lives.

“I came back from work and was preparing food for me when I received a message from my brother saying 'Diego died'.

I thought it was a joke.

If it was impossible for something like this to happen,

”, he reviews and remembers all the times that Maradona was on the verge of the end.

One of the most iconic photos of Maradona carried by Roberto Cejas.

“What does Maradona mean to me?

he had a magnet with the world.

But it was different because

It is a huge part of Argentina that just by naming it opened the doors of the planet for us ", he says and with a lump in his throat, he completes:

It is that to remember that moment you have to travel 34 years ago, when the big man who at that time had a mustache had sworn to his co-workers from the Santa Fe Lottery, that if Argentina beat Belgium the semifinals of the World Cup, he would travel to Mexico.

And he did.

arrived with a group of friends the day before the game against Germany and to enter the stadium they

Roberto and the memories of that final at the Azteca Stadium.

Photo José Almeida.

The game saw him behind the arc where

headed in to make it 1-0 in the first half.

With the game over,

Uncontrolled, he ran and began to move a wig that he had gotten: “I thought that was how I would be able to recognize myself in the videos.

I was going to look at the images and I was going to be able to say to my family 'look at the one who jumps there is me' ".

Amid the hubbub, Roberto ran after Maradona, who already had the World Cup in his hands.

"At one point someone lifted Pedro Pasculli who was also jogging with Diego,

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I don't know how I ducked, but he got on my shoulders.

I did not see anything, only photographers around me and while Diego handled me with his legs.

He saw Diego again years later, at the World Cup in Brazil, when the “Diez” hosted the De Zurda program, along with Victor Hugo Morales.

There, invited by the production, he met his idol again.

Roberto and Diego during the reunion on the De Zurda program.

Photo capture

“It was beautiful, I could tell him everything that I admired him.

What I wanted.

”. 

The famous photo will now be part of a small museum or altar that Roberto plans to build in a corner of his house.

There he will also put the newspaper clippings of that time.

Maradona said in an interview that he is one of the few who knows how much a World Cup weighs.

AFG

Look also

Diego Maradona died: "Football died", the disconsolate cry of Horacio Pagani

The last minutes of Diego Maradona alive: who he was with and what the idol wanted