The World Cup, A Very Peculiar History by David Arscott

Author:David Arscott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gift, information, facts, trivia, quirky, stories, football, soccer, fifa, sport, game, player, team, manager, coach, competition, tournament, goal, score, statistics
ISBN: 9781908759481
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Needle match

When this story surfaced, thoughts returned to the 1954 Final in Berne, when the much-fancied Hungarians went down to Germany. The suspicions then hadn’t been about the losers being drugged but about the winners being pepped-up versions of their normal selves.

Puskas, the Hungarian captain, said he was suspicious when he saw several of the Germans vomiting in their dressing room after the game – and it was certainly strange that several of them went down with jaundice in the following weeks and took a long time to recover.

And then, fifty years after the event, a groundsman employed by the stadium revealed that he had come across several syringes there after the Final. A false memory? Well, no, because the doctor of the 1954 team, Franz Loogen, now stepped forward with an explanation. He had, he said, given his players vitamin C injections to enhance their stamina. The needles were dirty (hence the jaundice), because he’d had to use his old Soviet-style sterilisation heater which wasn’t good enough to do a thorough job.

Three of the former players, now in their seventies, were sufficiently outraged to make a statement. The doctor, they claimed, had given them injections merely so that they would ‘stay fresh’. It was, you might think, a strange sort of ‘not guilty’ plea.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.