Maradona died: how the scoop that shook the world was created

11/25/2020 22:04

• Clarín.com

• Opinion

Updated 11/25/2020 10:04 PM

Died.

So, to dry.

Not one more word, not one less.

The message from the editor Mariano Verrina reaches the cell phone of the newspaper's head of Sports, Martín Voogd, at 1:06 p.m.

Fifty-eight seconds later, the news is on

home

:

.

Next:

.

A while later:

.

From the egg that breaks the shell - the first piece of information that something was wrong with Maradona had reached the head of Sports 17 minutes before - to the bird that spreads its wings and flies into the world, a fleeting sigh passes.

The journey to the heart of a scoop sometimes has a component of chance and a lot of obsessive work, of foresight, of putting together just

.

Journalists prepare their entire lives for a scoop that may

, or it may reach

.

The machine must be kept oiled because it is the only thing that can be foreseen.

The rest is fate

.

First, two ambulances arrive at Maradona's house in the San Andrés de Tigre neighborhood.

Then a nurse comes out into the street, shakes her head from side to side and repeats, lost in thought:

.

Simultaneously one more ambulance arrives, but this time

.

Those facts are the first data.

In Maradona's environment they say that the player was decompensated and they are trying to revive him.

The situation is dramatic.

Editor Julio Chiappetta gets another confirming source.

The boss of

, Juan Pablo Elverdin, writes, the editor Pablo Blanco reviews and the cover artist Facundo Chaves looks for the photo and titles.

publishes that Maradona is serious.

It is 13.04.

But immediately the first source affirms that there is no case, that he

.

The second confirms that he

.

The editor writes that word like this, simply, the head of Sports validates the sources,

publishes and the news flies.

Spain, Italy, United States, Brazil, England, Israel, Mexico.

All the vertigo stops short:

His name is a

Borgean

from Argentina.

 The

box

contains and repels, shelters and expels, but it always reminds the Argentines who look out to see

.

Hate and love, in the fullest Argentina, are first cousins ​​that sometimes wink at each other.

Like politics and football.

It's funny, or not so much.

When Perón died - the greatest icon of Argentine politics in the modern era - the newspaper

made its cover with the only word that the editor of

now uses

to communicate to his boss what had happened with Maradona.

He died

, and everything else is left over.

Someone said it in Naples, in the midst of the thundering earthquake of simultaneous repercussions, and flocks of flying birds in all possible planetary senses:

.

The life of legend will always have scraps to continue cutting.

Uncharted celluloid corners.

Is this possible?

How many times did we see the second goal against the English?

And yet

appeared

.

The magnificent English striker Gary Lineker, who was on the Azteca Stadium court that time, said a few months ago:

”.

Now let's look at the biggest goal in the world again.

.

Maradona's instep accommodates her with fleeting caresses.

Tomorrow they will look like kisses.

Kisses from the left-handed instep but on the run and dodging English as if they were wells from Fiorito.

It is so clumsy to say that that triumph of the captain with the loose curlers and the inflated chest was the revenge of the Falklands as it is useless to deny that thousands of those who saw it while it was happening, in real time, contracted an

with Maradona

that overcame time. .

His iconic face used in politics - including his persistent contradiction of supporting dictatorships as if they were progressive governments - thrust him into the crack with the force of a whirlpool and now he may be the one to carry his coffin to the burning chapel in the Casa Rosada.

His final tribute in the temple of government rather than a temple of football will not be without political speculation, but it will not be eternal either.

The

of his universal art and a certain

of the man who builds himself will

remain

, like a David who gets up every morning to put the saving stone back into the giant's eye.

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