From the back of a pickup truck, a film reporter was taking images of a small village in the Ukrainian countryside. The reporting team, made up of South American journalists, was heading down the road to Lviv, one of the many cities attacked by the Russian army, when two local police cars pulled up and asked their vehicle to stop.
The authorities requested passports and other documents, in addition to collecting the cameras, notebooks and cell phones of press professionals. From there, they were taken to the police station, where communication was not very fluid.
It didn’t help that Juan Zamudio, the cameraman filming from the truck, had a Russian passport stamp. He was in the coverage of the 2018 World Cup, based in the country ruled by Vladimir Putin, responsible for the bombings and attacks that devastate the Ukrainian territory for three weeks.
“The language difference was an issue. They sometimes suspect that we may be recording images to send information to Russia or something. It had happened before. In a moment, they realize that we are Argentines and in one sentence, spoken in Ukrainian , we only understand the words ‘Maradona’ and ‘Messi'”, says Zamudio, who is 36 years old and has worked for the Telefe channel for 17 years, sheet.
“That’s when, to ease the situation a little, I show you the tattoo I have of Maradona [na panturrilha]. Luckily, the treatment completely changed.”
Alongside the Argentine cameraman was Chilean reporter Daniel Matamala, who showed the Ukrainian police a photo of himself with Lionel Messi.
The confirmation – or the impression dismissed by the authorities – that the journalists were in the service of Russia allowed them to retrieve their equipment and head towards Lviv. Messi’s goal, Maradona’s miracle.
“I have loved Diego since I was a child and he has always been my idol,” says Zamudio, who is a fan of Boca Juniors, the club for which Maradona won his only Argentine title in his career in 1981 and where he retired from football in 1997.
The idolatry of the player can be seen not only on his skin, but also on an Instagram account he manages under the name “Diego de mi vida”. The page brings together photos and videos of the career of the eternal Argentine number 10, who died in November 2020, at the age of 60.
Juan Zamudio got the tattoo as a teenager, when he was 15. Today, the image is already worn out, but it should remain that way. Remembrance of the day Maradona rescued him from trouble in the war.
“I did it more than 20 years ago, so it’s off. But I’m not going to retouch it either”, laughs the Argentine, sent to Ukraine to cover the conflict.
Zamudio’s account is curious, but not new. At least not for the Maradonian Church, founded in 2001 as an idol-worshipping movement.
Hernan Amaz, the founder of the church, says that over these two decades he has received similar testimonies to the Argentine cameraman in Ukraine. Even in episodes of war.
It tells the story of a journalist who covered the Iraq War (2003-2011) and needed to go through a border control in the city of Baghdad to go to the north of the country. The soldiers carrying out the document check weren’t convinced they’d let him through, until they saw a photo of Maradona in the reporter’s wallet.
Enthusiastically, they repeated the name of the former player among themselves: “Maradona! Maradona!”. The reporter managed to get past the control and continued on his way.
“Football achieves these things, these miracles. It was a Maradonian miracle,” Hernan said of the episode.
Diego Armando Maradona died in 2020 after suffering a cardiac arrest. His legacy, however, lives on. In memories, tattoos and border controls of wars.
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