On February 9, 2016, Hurricane played against Caracas in Venezuela for the rematch of the qualifying playoffs for the group stage of the Copa Libertadores. He Globo they had won 1-0 in the first leg at home with a goal from Mariano González and had to defend the result at the Olympic stadium in the Venezuelan capital. Diego MendozaMore He was the hero of that night, with an agonizing goal that sealed the round pass for the team led by Eduardo Domínguez. Fate took him from ecstasy to bordering on tragedy.
Huracán defeated Banfield 3-2 and reached the top at the close of the second date of the Professional League
At the Tomás Ducó stadium, Nicolás Cordero, Fernando Tobio and Gabriel Gudiño scored for the Globo. Andrés Chávez and Guillermo Soto (e/c) for the Drill. Before, Defense and Justice defeated Gimnasia 2-0 in La Plata with goals from Santiago Solari and Uvita Fernández
Those from Parque Patricios lost 2-0 and needed a goal to qualify for Group 4. At minute 90, Patricio Toranzo connected with Ezequiel Miralles, who threw a cross at the head of a recently admitted Mendoza, which made the burning throats explode. Everything was merriment, everything was merriment until the wee hours of the Caracas morning at the concentration hotel. All the festive spirit would abruptly go out during the bus trip that the campus made the next morning. The destination was the Caracas airport, but the bus’s gearbox and brakes broke and the journey never finished.
“We saw that the collective was not very well. The driver didn’t drive very well either. What’s more, once we had to get off the bus because it was noisy. We felt that it was not in condition ”confesses Mendoza, in an exclusive chat with infobae 7 years after the accident that could end in tragedy. The members of the Argentine delegation went up singing, dancing and listening to music, euphoric for having fulfilled their mission. The weather that reigned inside that bus was so good that they dismissed the loud blow that was heard not well after the start of the tour and they disbelieved the words of the physical trainer Pablo Santella: “Boys, the brakes broke”. The son of Carlos Bianchi’s mythical collaborator was prone to jokes even during matches, which is why the players took his comment with sarcasm. Things got serious when Eduardo Dominguez He approached to confirm what happened: “Go back, we ran out of brakes”. The DT was few and fair words. His gesture during the brief walk from the front to the back seats was unmistakable: something wasn’t right.
The next five minutes seemed like an eternity to the passengers. Fear began to seize each of them. “At first there were many screams, until at one point there was silence because you felt the speed”, is another of the shocking phrases that Mendoza releases. The section from the door of the hotel was downhill and because of that the bus gained momentum faster and faster. Alerted to what was happening, the prop van got in front of the bus to try to stop it, but it was only hit, as were two other cars that passed in vain. The bus took curves at more than 100 kilometers per hour. The members of the delegation moved and fell abruptly because there were no seat belts.
Oaxaca officials diverted millions of pesos intended for victims of Hurricane “Agatha”
Salomón Jara, governor of the state, explained that at least three former mayors incurred in possible acts of corruption
“A lot of people say ‘does your family cross your mind?’ All I thought was ‘we’re dying’. I remember saying ‘we die, we die, we die’”is the raw memory of the striker who He has just given up football at the age of 30 due to the consequences that this accident left on his physique.
The vehicle came to be thrown at 145 kilometers per hour. At that point several motorcyclists escorted him to help him because they had noticed that he had no brakes. The highways of Caracas abound with escape ramps, which are used by cars that run out of brakes to slow down and stall on stones that act as a kind of quicksand that immobilizes them. The driver of the Huracán bus took one of these lifesaving shortcuts and, going uphill, the vehicle lost some speed although it collided sharply with the mound of earth and rock at the upper end. The doctor and the security of the Huracán campus had seen that at the side of the base of the ramp there was a precipiceso when the bus bounced and slid backwards, they started yelling at the driver to roll it over to prevent it from going off a cliff.
Juan Guaidó: “Daniel Ortega used Nicaragua to launder gold from Venezuela”
In this interview, the former president in charge of Venezuela takes stock of the lessons and lessons learned from his management
Diego Mendoza provides details of his desperate journey: “I never told this. When we crash on the escape ramp, I fly on my feet and my right foot gets caught between the seat and the window. I am left with a belt around my neck, which was what saved my face, and my foot was trapped. I wanted to take it out and I couldn’t. We were going straight to the precipice and the bus tipped over to my side, then it crushed my foot”.
A sepulchral silence followed the explosion of several windows of the bus, the impact of the front of the vehicle and the overturning, plus the crunch of stones as it skidded several meters down. Mendoza, who first made sure that field assistant Gustavo Turco Mhamed regained consciousness and then threw his cell phone with the exploding screen into a bag, resumes his nightmare: “I saw that I had the roof skylight next to me, it was half open and I went out there. I was the first. I had felt like an emptiness, a cold in the foot. And he had seen blood. When I go out, I realized that I could not step. I jumped two meters and saw that the Pato (Toranzo) came out ahead. The first thing I thought there was ‘thank you, I’m alive, I’m alive’”.
The adrenaline prevented Mendoza from fainting, who once removed from the scene and seated, “adjusted” the foot that needed urgent medical attention. Several of the companions who came to see what had happened to him and Toranzo fainted from shock when they saw the painting. Diego began to feel thirsty and cold, he believed that he was about to lose consciousness, but in the distance he saw that there were many people who came to help the victims and that they had recorded the crash with their cell phones. With the last drops of lucidity, he begged his family to tell his family that he was fine.
“Many were surprised by the state of my foot, but the only thing I thought about there was that I was alive and that my relatives should be told that I was fine.” The ambulances that arrived went in search of Toranzo, Mendoza and the doctor Pedro Di Spagna, who had suffered a fissure in his vertebrae and severe hip trauma. The former center forward also said that the Pariata Hospital, to which they were referred, did not give them complete confidence. There, a debate arose about the possible amputation of the extremities of the two burning players. Toranzo remained in shock. All Mendoza wanted was for them to notify their relatives that they were healthy. Both wanted them to assure them that at least they were not going to amputate them there in Venezuela. The kinesiologist Leonel Arrogant promised him, he wrote a private message to Diego Mendoza’s brother with his own cell phone, he shared a publication with a photo of him clarifying that he was fine. It was only then that Mendoza was able to sleep a wink, who between the sedation for the first operation and the drop in revolutions slept for around 24 hours.
Mendoza woke up with an arm in a cast and in the medical report that had fallen into Toranzo’s hands -since they had been exchanged- it said that in addition to his serious injury to his right foot, he had suffered a fracture and dislocation of his left elbow. He himself dismissed that second injury, something that was corroborated with later studies (his left arm had only had a blow). The affected areas of the footballers had been washed, but a decision had to be made regarding the possible amputation of him in less than 72 hours. The rental of the medical plane took longer than expected and both arrived in Argentine territory 54 hours after the accident.
Without much room for evaluation, the doctor Fernando Locaso ruled out the amputation of Toranzo and asked Mendoza for more analysis time, who at that point already had some concern about the hypothetical loss of his limb, beyond the fact that his optimism for being alive reigned (in fact he had even done some pranks on his teammates at the Venezuelan hospital center). “You were crazy lucky, huh. We don’t cut off your leg”, was the reception to the conscience of the doctor in Mendoza, after the intervention in Argentina. The cast left his toes exposed, so a sensation of relief went through Diego at that moment.
The enormous power of improvement of Toranzo and Mendoza allowed them to play professional soccer again. Both wore the Hurricane shirt again after several months of rehabilitation and psychological trauma. Diego confessed that he suffered from severe depression between the third and fourth month that led him to seriously rethink his life. Almost a year after the turnaround in Venezuela, he stepped on a field again and stretched out what seemed like a sung retirement. He passed through Belgrano de Córdoba and Ibiza of the Spanish ascent, before hanging up his boots due to the excruciating pain he has as a result of the accident.
Today, still in dispute with the Parque Patricios club and Conmebol, the former players who had such a bad time on February 10 in Caracas, dedicate themselves to other tasks and give themselves the “luxury” of developing a full life. That nightmare will surely accompany them for the rest of their lives, but the important thing for them is that “they can tell it.”
THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW WITH DIEGO MENDOZA
Keep reading:
