Second Sight

Before the match, all the players have their eyes taped shut. They quietly cluster together at the edge of the field, shoulder to shoulder, their heads bowed, as if they are checking whether they can see the artificial turf beneath their feet. The coach approaches and they turn their faces and closed eyes toward him in a gesture born of habit and trust. The coach affixes large adhesive bandages over their eyes and then carefully makes sure all the edges are sealed down.

“It must really hurt when it’s torn off their eyelids, eyebrows and eyelashes,” I think, involuntarily frowning. And then I ask, “Why cover up their eyes? They’re blind as it is.”

“Not all of them,” the coach says. “Some of them can distinguish light and dark. And it’s important that everyone be on an even footing out there on the field.”

On a miniature field, surrounded by low, padded walls, eight blind soccer players kick a ball about. They play awkwardly, as if they are new to the game. The small, heavy ball rarely takes flight and sluggishly rolls around underfoot. There are no swift zigs or zags, no long passes. Indeed, passing is a tricky business in blind soccer. If the ball gets away, it is not that easy to locate it. As long as it is rolling, a little bell inside jingles so the players can locate it. But if the ball stops, the jingling stops, and the blind players are left totally in the dark.

The players’ apparent awkwardness actually reflects their long experience in the sport: the odd-looking economy of their movements is from tension; they are concentrating deeply. With sound alone as their guide, they must “see” the trajectory of the ball and grasp where both their teammates and opponents are on the field. They are supposed to keep track of the field’s boundaries and the position of the goal, of course not mixing up theirs and the other team’s – all while trying to avoid serious injury to themselves or others.

I say “supposed to” because they are not always successful. They are constantly taking hits: slamming at full speed into one another or into the walls, or, most dangerously, into the goalposts. Blind soccer players experience a lot of injuries: battered noses, lips, hands and knees are common. True enough, I never saw anyone writhing in pain on the grass after being injured, medics rushing toward them with a stretcher. But I did see blind players who did not even notice their cut brows or knees charging back into the fray, dripping blood on the field.

If you feel that blind soccer is an inelegant pursuit, I encourage you to conduct an experiment. Close your eyes and go, for example, to your home’s foyer. Without benefit of sight, locate your coat and shoes (making sure you have the right ones) and put them on by touch alone. Be sure to time yourself, and also to keep track of how many times you stumble or bump into the wall, corners, doorjambs or furniture. I dare say you’ll be surprised by the results. A relatively short and familiar path (a few meters at most) turns out to be extremely thorny. I don’t mean it as an insult when I point out that you probably would find it difficult to get a spoonful of soup to your mouth with your eyes closed, even if you’ve performed this simple act a million times in your life.

And these kids are blindly kicking a ball into a goal that is being guarded by a goalkeeper – one who can see perfectly well! No joke: a sighted goalie without any vision issues whatsoever. How can you possibly not protect a mini-goal on a mini-field from a ball kicked by a forward who cannot see you, the ball, or the goal? For their part, the goalies are doing their best to defend their goal, not to surrender any points. They want their team to win, after all.

Part of the secret of the blind soccer players’ success is that their coaches are their navigators. They call out instructions and, knocking on the metal uprights, help them stay oriented toward the goal.

After the final whistle, the coaches and goalkeepers gather their players together like hens gathering their chicks. The athletes form a line, each with his hand on a comrade’s shoulder, their tired faces raised skyward, looking a bit like Bruegel’s painting The Blind Leading the Blind. Only here, in the real world, the first in line is a sighted member of the team, and the column leaves the field with quick, sure steps.

In the evening, I talk with some of the team members competing in Russia’s Blind Soccer Championship, hoping to fathom the source of their secret strength. The most radiant and smiling player, the season’s best – captain of the Moscow Oblast team, Slava Zhiltsov – is no less shy of me than I am of him. Feeling awkward for not knowing the etiquette for interacting with a person who cannot see me, I say, “If you like, you may touch my face.” I’m not sure what inspired this idea, but Slava, clearly embarrassed, taps my cheek with two fingers and then puts his hands behind his back.

“I’m shy. A bit hung-up, actually,” he says. “On the field with the team, I’m sometimes even afraid to speak up. I’m also afraid of just going up and talking to a girl. Not that there is anything scary about that.”

Slava has been playing blind soccer for many years, but does not consider himself a particularly strong person. I ask him to recall a time when he felt truly strong. He answers without hesitating, “I recently met a girl. In this sense I’m not as uptight as I used to be. She was so shy that I knew I had to take the initiative. I managed to convince her that there was nothing scary about me and I wouldn’t do anything bad. Now, she likes me, and we get along really well.”

According to Slava, the strongest person he has ever met is his coach, Nikolai Nikolayevich Beregovoy, since he is constantly yelling and swearing and getting money out of sponsors for their competitions.

“Kids who have lost their eyesight are often extremely uncoordinated,” Beregovoy explains, motioning toward the players running on the field. “Here’s a vivid example: these seem like pretty simple movements, but not everyone can do them.” He breaks off and runs to help his athletes. He had just assigned them another set of exercises: run from sideline to sideline, moving their arms as if they were swimming the crawl. Several were paddling in the wrong direction.

These are the best of the best in this particular sport, yet even they have difficulty controlling their bodies.

There are few true athletes in blind soccer. The spoils here go not to those strong in body, but in mind and spirit. Therefore, the un-sighted focus first and foremost on training their brains. They begin with learning not to get right and left mixed up, and on maintaining their balance.

Beregovoy is an unbelievably patient person. He has the fortitude to repeatedly explain the same thing over and over. After all, he cannot teach his charges by example, modeling how one should move, nor can he say, “Just watch Sergei and do what he’s doing.” Beregovoy also has the tact to not swear at the kids if something doesn’t go right. He has compassion for them and protects them, even though that’s probably not in line with the coach as tough guy ethos.

Beregovoy began training blind athletes fifteen years ago. It was a decision that was both spontaneous and deeply personal.

In the late 1980s, when he was serving in Ethiopia, a dear friend suffered a serious head wound and began to lose his sight. It turned his world upside down. A few years later, by which time Beregovoy had become a college physical education teacher in Novosibirsk, a group of blind students asked permission to use the college’s gym. Since they did not have the money to rent it, the college refused their request. When Beregovoy found out about this, he gave the blind athletes his own gym time and began helping them in their training, working on Paralympic sports like goalball and soccer. Eventually, he became something of an expert in this realm and was invited to Moscow Oblast to coach its blind soccer team.

Of course he should be admired as a hero, but in fact his is a thankless job in some ways. Without a doubt, Beregovoy is fulfilling a very noble mission. He is helping blind kids gain confidence, get stronger physically, find true friends, and experience the world. He is raising high, as they say, the flag of Paralympism and taking its values (equality, bravery, determination) to the masses. But the flip side of this gilded coin is that there is no money in it.

If you search long and hard throughout Russia, you may find ten or fifteen more or less competent blind soccer teams. The majority are grassroots, self-funded operations, and fully half do not have the means to travel to competitions. Coaches go hat in hand to whatever charities they can find and beg for funds to support the teams. They set aside money from their own salaries to rent buses and send their players to matches in neighboring regions. They sleep in friends’ apartments and subsist on instant mashed potatoes. They pester local businesses with requests to buy their team a second ball, because it’s hard to practice with just one. And it pains them that their athletes are spending their disability payments on travel to the Russian championships.

“All these years, we’ve been caught in a vicious circle,” Beregovoy says. “They promise us funding if we can win something. But without normal funding it’s hard to play at that level, and so we haven’t gotten anything.” Now I better understand Slava Zhiltsov’s comment about Beregovoy being strong, “constantly yelling and swearing, getting money out of sponsors.”

Ten years of this sort of coaching would wear anyone down. And certainly Beregovoy gives the impression of someone who is tired. But get him talking about his kids, and the fire in his belly is back. He is lucky, because he has unbelievably motivated players. They kick a ball around in complete darkness for years on end not for million-dollar salaries (a player’s salary on the national team is a laughable 25,000 rubles per month, or just over $400), and not for the roar of the crowds (which number fewer than the players themselves). No, these blind kids are playing to give their lives meaning.

The backbone of the Russian National Blind Soccer Team are the players from the Moscow Oblast team. This is Beregovoy’s team; these are the kids he started with, and over the span of 10 years he has raised some of them to the level of Masters of Sport. Of course it helps that the capital is nearby, meaning there is more money and there are more ways to realize a dream.

The national team also draws several players from the Mari El Republic, which is relatively close to Moscow (about 600 kilometers), but it is also one of Russia’s smaller, least-known, and poorest regions. And yet they have managed to cultivate a decent team. The secret of their success is rather banal: they pay their players. Not much, but pay them they do.

There is also a rather unique player on the national team, Seryozha Gavrikov, from Nizhny Novgorod. They say that physically, were it not for his lack of sight, he might well have excelled as a “normal” athlete.

Gavrikov lost his sight due to a doctor’s negligence. When Seryozha was two, his mother began to notice that he held his toys closer to his eyes than seemed normal. The family lived in a village, and the local doctor, after examining the boy, said that there was nothing to worry about, that it would pass. But Seryozha’s sight only got worse. When they finally took him to a hospital in the regional capital, it was too late. He had a malignant tumor that had progressed too far. Both of his eyes had to be removed.

“Not every un-sighted person can be taught to play soccer,” says Yevgeny Chegayev, a physical education teacher and Gavrikov’s coach in Nizhny Novgorod. “People who lose their sight spend their entire lives learning to walk. Soccer is an extra burden for a blind person. Some try it then give it up, because they don’t do well. They bang heads with someone once or twice and then lose interest. It’s difficult. Painful. But Seryozha is not a quitter. He’s a natural. He soaks up everything like a sponge, he’s intelligent, he’s got a head on his shoulders. His parents did a lot for him, helped him get through his rehabilitation.”

It is not a simple decision for a family to turn their child over to a boarding school several hundred kilometers from home. But for children who have lost their sight, it is unavoidable. At specialized schools for children with visual impairment, they not only receive regular schooling, but also learn how to live by touch, to be independent and self-supporting.

Seryozha is a strong, determined young man, but even he finds it difficult to combine his studies and professional sports. Just getting to the field where the blind soccer team trains – he must get there himself, via public transport – takes 90 minutes each way.

Chegayev’s long-held dream has been to transform the weed-filled empty lot next to the boarding school into a mini-soccer field and sports training area, so that blind and limited-sight students can have P.E. classes in the fresh air. City bureaucrats even promised to donate to the school the former playing surface from a soccer pitch being upgraded for the 2018 World Cup.

Gavrikov is studying hard and worrying a bit about his marks, because if he does not pass his classes, they won’t let him compete. But of course his teachers are not going to let that happen. They love Seryozha and have no doubts about his scholastic or athletic future.

“You need an education,” Gavrikov asserts. The talented, budding sportsman does not place all his hopes on soccer. “I am not certain that I will stick with the sport, that I can earn a living at soccer. But for now I have a goal in life: to play like Manzhos.”

Sergei Manzhos is like Beckham, only better. Because he plays soccer blind. He is the captain of the Russian national team and one of its most experienced players. Manzhos is in amazing shape. Aside from soccer, he also swims and does bike racing, training on a track on a tandem bike. He’s on his feet all day and gets around Moscow just fine on his own.

“I didn’t know that blind people could be so independent,” says his wife Irina. The couple met at a competition in Austria; she was playing goalball for Vologda Oblast, Sergei for Moscow Oblast. They were seated at the same table for dinner and the coach asked Irina to help her blind colleague to his seat. It took him two years to win her affection. “I had feelings,” Irina says, “but I was not certain I could take on such a relationship. I thought, ‘here is this guy without sight, how can I live with him?’ I thought that I would have to take care of him like a small child, prepare everything for him, lead him everywhere. I had no way of knowing that it was not I who would be helping him, but he who would be helping me.”

A lively, bold little girl is bouncing around us on the grass. This is Nastya, Sergei and Irina’s six-year-old daughter. She clearly loves her father and is a great helper, clinging to him and flattering him, leading him by the hand to the swimming pool. Manzhos worries that his busy training schedule leaves him little time to spend with his family. So when the opportunity arose, he risked taking his wife and daughter with him to a tournament in Sochi. He relaxes and goes swimming with them between training sessions. It’s not the sort of thing you see very often: people here tend to feel that a family gets in the way of concentrating on one’s sport.

Sergei splashes about in the open-air pool with his daughter. He’s having so much fun he doesn’t mind that it’s cold. And even if the coach spots them being silly and laughing, can he really reproach them for being happy?

In 2015, after ten years of determined training, after surmounting a multitude of obstacles, the Russian national blind soccer team won a decisive match in the European Championships, earning a spot in the Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

But then, in the summer of 2016, just a few weeks before the start of the games, the Russian Paralympic team was banned from participation in the Paralympics. The blind soccer team, which for the entirety of its existence has never even been indirectly touched by a doping scandal, was forced to stay home.

Slava Zhiltsov, who not long before all this had to leave the sport because of health problems, married his girlfriend.

Sergei Manzhos earned the title Master of Sport, international class, and will soon receive his second higher educational degree, in medicine.

Sergei Gavrikov also earned the title Master of Sport, international class, and a sports complex is under construction at his boarding school.

Nikolai Beregovoy, after the team was banned, shaved his head in protest, but continued to coach children and adults with limited or no sight. His goal has not changed: he still dreams one day of taking his team to the Paralympics. RL