Scorer of the 1st World Cup goal arrived in Uruguay on a ship that would be used in the war

In April 1923, an ocean liner departed William Beardmore & Co’s shipyards at Dalmuir, near Glasgow, Scotland, for the first of a series of voyages that would place it in historic settings.

It was a luxurious ship, decorated and furnished by Italian artists and craftsmen, named Conde Verde, in honor of Amadeus 6th, a 14th-century Count of Savoy.

Designed to travel from Europe to South America or Asia, he made the trip that made him internationally known in 1930, heading to Uruguay, host of the first World Cup in history.

Along the route that began in Genoa, Italy, where the Romanian delegation embarked, three more teams boarded. First, in Vilafranca de Mar, the French players and then FIFA president Jules Rimet —carrying the cup in his suitcase— joined the travelers. The Belgians took the ship in Barcelona. Before landing in Montevideo, he passed through Rio de Janeiro to seek the Brazilian team.

With the boycott of the main European teams at the time, only one more team from the continent would be in Uruguay, the former Yugoslavia. As they were slow to confirm their participation, however, the Yugoslavs had to take another vessel, at a time when the concept of air travel was still new.

On July 4th, after 15 days of travel and just nine days before the opening of the World Cup, the travelers from Conde Verde disembarked in Montevideo.

“We really didn’t realize the enormity of why we were going to Uruguay. It wasn’t until years later that we appreciated our place in history. It was just adventure. We were young people having fun. The trip on Conte Verde lasted 15 days. It was very happy days. “, told the FIFA website French midfielder Lucien Laurent, who in addition to being part of the trip would also be marked by scoring the first goal in the history of the World Cups.

At that time, it was not yet a tradition for the host team to play in the opening game. On July 13, France vs Mexico and USA vs Belgium started the dispute simultaneously.

At Parque Central stadium, the Americans opened the scoring by 3-0 in the 23rd minute of the first half. Four minutes earlier, but at the Pocitos stadium, Lucien Laurent had already scored. In the 19th minute of the opening period, he opened the way for the French rout by 4 to 1 over the Mexicans.

“When I scored my goal, which was the first of the tournament and my first for France, we congratulated each other, but without jumping over each other as they do now”, recalls the midfielder.

Not only the players were contained in the celebration. It took the French themselves decades to give Laurent due recognition for the feat.

The midfielder only began to gain more prestige from 1990, when the organizers of the Cup in Italy invited him to a gala dinner. Before that, not even his son knew how important his father was to football.

“I knew he had played for France and participated in the World Cup, but that was it,” Marc Laurent, the son with whom the player spent his last years until he died in 2005, aged 97, told FIFA’s website.

In 1998, when the World Cup was played on French soil, the midfielder finally experienced the pleasure of being treated as a national idol. Only then did he begin to recall the historic ship voyage.

“The French federation had a job to put together a team because several of the selected players had to withdraw,” explained Laurent. “Their bosses wouldn’t let them take two months off. I was working for Peugeot at the time, as were three of my teammates: my brother Jean, Andre Maschinot and Etienne Mattler.”

France did not pass the first phase in that edition. In three duels, he won only in his debut. Then, they lost to Argentina and Chile — the Argentines, by the way, advanced to the final, when they were defeated by the hosts.

Defeated, the Europeans again faced a long transatlantic voyage aboard the Conde Verde. The ship would return to South America dozens of times until the 1940s.

When Italy officially entered World War II, the ship was taken to Shanghai, where Jews persecuted by the Nazis were fleeing.

Later, when Japanese forces took over the Chinese city, the crew decided to sink the ship so that it would not be incorporated by the Japanese navy.

The Japanese, however, managed to recover the vessel, renamed the Kotobuki Maru. The ocean liner’s career spanned until December 1944, when she was again sunk, this time after being targeted by bombs from American forces.

This is the third in a series of ten texts about important characters from the World Cups that, over time, have been forgotten. They are published on Thursdays.