When Brazilian goalkeeper Jakson Follmann took his first steps since surviving a plane crash that wiped out his soccer club, he called it a win — with his most difficult ever season just starting.
Follmann was the reserve goalkeeper for Chapecoense, who went from the most feelgood team in Brazil to a national tragedy.
This was a lowly club who had fought their way to the finals of the regional Copa Sudamericana tournament. Then on Nov, 28 last year almost the whole team was wiped out when the plane flying the players to Medellin, Colombia, for the first leg of the final crashed.
Photo: AFP
Seventy one people died, including star first-choice goalkeeper Danilo.
Follmann lost his right leg, but was one of six survivors.
Now the athlete, 24, is drawing on all his competitive spirit and discipline to rebuild his life.
“My main desire now is to be able to stand up, to walk,” he told reporters at a rehab center where he is learning to walk with a prosthetic leg and to overcome multiple other injuries.
Almost three months after the accident he has taken his first unaided steps. There is much more to come.
“I want to be able to go alone to the bathroom, to brush my teeth. All the simple things that people barely notice usually,” he said.
Follmann left his home in the southern city of Alecrim when he was just 13, working his way through the gritty lower leagues, but always dreaming of making it to the first division.
The tragic reversal of what had seemed like a fairy-tale success has not broken Follmann.
“Crying over this and feeling sorry for myself will not help,” he said in a soft voice.
Follmann might be up again, but after several operations and 56 days in hospital every step is filled with pain.
He has been doing physiotherapy in Sao Paulo with Jose Andre Carvalho since last month and his progress has been better than expected.
In addition to losing his right leg below the knee, his left ankle was badly injured, he broke several bones and needed an operation on his spine.
It is a battering that has required him to hold back his sportsman’s instinct for action.
“When I began taking my first steps without crutches I wanted to go up and down staircases. My first thought was to do as much as I could, but I know that for now I can’t and that I have to respect my body,” he said.
Still, he says that physical challenges are something he is used to and he follows the doctor’s physiotherapy instructions with the kind of concentration he used to deploy in goal.
“I don’t consider myself an ex-athlete. To the contrary: I see myself as even more of an athlete than before,” he said with a laugh.
In the future, he might turn to Paralympic sports, Follmann says.
Trying out wheelchair volleyball made him think that “limitations are all in your head.”
Despite his fighting spirit, Follmann prefers to look to the future than back to the recent past.
For weeks after his accident, he asked family and friends not to talk about the crash. He did not want to know the details, or to watch television, where news of the disaster played constantly.
Waking in hospital in Colombia, “I knew something very serious had happened, because I saw I was badly hurt.”
“I realized that the last time I’d been OK was back in the airplane,” he said, with his eyes downcast.
In Colombia “I cried a lot. I was very emotional, but once I arrived in Brazil, I began to gather my strength to face things,” he said.
A sumo star was born in Japan on Sunday when 24-year-old Takerufuji became the first wrestler in 110 years to win a top-division tournament on his debut, triumphing at the 15-day Spring Grand Sumo Tournament in Osaka despite injuring his ankle on the penultimate day. Takerufuji, whose injury had left him in a wheelchair outside the ring, shoved out the higher-ranked Gonoyama at the Edion Arena Osaka to the delight of the crowd, giving him an unassailable record of 13 wins and two losses to claim the Emperor’s Cup. “I did it just through willpower. I didn’t really know what was going
The US’ Ilia Malinin on Saturday produced six scintillating quadruple jumps, including a quadruple Axel, in the men’s free skate to capture his first figure skating world title. The 19-year-old nicknamed the “Quad god,” who is the only skater to land a quadruple Axel in competition, dazzled with an array of breathtakingly executed jumps starting with his quad Axel and including a quadruple Lutz in combination with a triple flip and a quadruple toe loop in combination with a triple toe. He added an unexpected triple-triple combination at the end to earn a world-record 227.79 in the free program for a championship
Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter is being criminally investigated by the IRS, and the attorney for his alleged bookmaker said Thursday that the ex-Los Angeles Dodgers employee placed bets on international soccer — but not baseball. The IRS confirmed Thursday that interpreter Ippei Mizuhara and Mathew Bowyer, the alleged illegal bookmaker, are under criminal investigation through the agency’s Los Angeles Field Office. IRS Criminal Investigation spokesperson Scott Villiard said he could not provide additional details. Mizuhara, 39, was fired by the Dodgers on Wednesday following reports from the Los Angeles Times and ESPN about his alleged ties to an illegal bookmaker and debts well
MLB on Friday announced a formal investigation into the scandal swirling around Shohei Ohtani and his former interpreter amid charges that the Los Angeles Dodgers superstar was the victim of “massive theft.” The Dodgers on Wednesday fired Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani’s long-time interpreter and close friend, after Ohtani’s representatives alleged that the Japanese two-way star had been the victim of theft, which was reported to involve millions of dollars and link Mizuhara to a suspected illegal bookmaker in California. “Major League Baseball has been gathering information since we learned about the allegations involving Shohei Ohtani and Ippei Mizuhara from the news media,” MLB