At first it seemed that the escape was doomed to failure. Three players of the Albania national team fled a day before the game. As soon as the plane landed in Geneva, they left the airport, got into a taxi, and no one saw them again. The three escorts – special police officers – were at that time busy shopping in the duty-free store.
However, everything turned out to be ridiculously simple. Before the game, Vata, as planned, met with a group of Albanian dissidents living in France. And after the referee’s final whistle, Vata said goodbye to his teammates and coach, ran out of the stadium, got into a car waiting for him, and was soon at the railway station. And a few hours later he was calmly drinking beer in a safe house 40 km from Nantes. All he had with him was $250 in cash, a bag with still dirty boots, and the tracksuit he was wearing.
He was not given a work permit in France, so Vata could not play for a professional club. He trained with a second-division team and studied French by watching television programs. And he was happy, although he did not know whether he would ever play big football again. He had few friends, little money, and no prospects, but there was also no way back: the escape had made him an “enemy of the people.” However, as Vata says, God heard his prayers, and the communist regime fell. Just a few weeks later, Rudi arrived at the World Cup qualifying match against the Lithuania national team.
Vata, frankly speaking, was lucky – he was noticed at a match between the national teams of Albania and Northern Ireland, after which he was offered a contract with the famous Scottish club Celtic. Albanian footballers were leaving the country by the hundreds, and only a few drew the lucky ticket. One of the key players of the current Albania national team, Altin Lala, had fled as a young man with friends from the national team camp. But of the whole group, only he, after going through many trials, managed to break through to the top and sign a contract with a strong German club.
In general, Albanians were at one time called absolute record-holders: the number of footballers from that country who illegally crossed the border numbered in the hundreds. However, they were neither the first nor the last. Even after 1956, when Soviet troops entered Hungary, the three strongest players of that country’s national team – Puskás, Kocsis, and Czibor – decided not to return home from a foreign tour. After that they were declared “enemies of the people.” In 1988, Kubík (to Italy’s Fiorentina) and Knoflíček (to Germany’s St. Pauli) illegally left Czechoslovakia, and before them the 17-year-old Czech Votava had ended up at Germany’s Werder.
In the same 1988, the Steaua defender Belodedici left Romania in a scandal and moved to his historical homeland in Serbia. Some other well-known footballers of the past also began their path in big football with adventures. Thus, the white Zimbabwean Grobbelaar, who had defended the Rhodesian regime with weapons in hand, ended up in Canada after its fall, where at first he tried to become a baseball player (he soon realized that his calling was football and the goalkeeper’s gloves of Liverpool).
And the dark-skinned forward N’Doram, famous for his performances for the French club Nantes, at one time risked illegally crossing by boat across the river that separates his native Chad and Cameroon. Is it worth guessing whether his fate would have turned out had he not decided to make the crossing?
Returning to chess, it is worth noting that there are plenty of illegal emigrants in that environment as well. The famous chess player Viktor Korchnoi, born in Leningrad, went to a tournament in Holland in 1976 and did not return. The decision had been made in advance, but the catalyst that accelerated the process was Korchnoi’s interview with French journalists. After its publication (Korchnoi criticized the USSR for refusing to take part in the Olympiad in Israel), the chess player realized that at home he would simply be destroyed.
The Soviet authorities reacted very sharply to the flight of the outstanding athlete. Viktor Lvovich’s son was imprisoned on a fabricated charge, and his wife was not allowed to leave. The family remained hostages. They called him no end of names – villain, renegade, traitor. Soon, however, the family problems were resolved. And the departure to the West, in the general opinion, prolonged Korchnoi’s chess life, who still battles against chess players young enough to be his great-grandchildren.
The scandal that broke out in May 1989 was very loud: one of the most talented hockey players of the Soviet Union, 20-year-old Alexander Mogilny, fled to North America after the end of the World Championship held in Sweden. “It was all so long ago,” recalls now the celebrated hockey player, who became one of the brightest stars of the NHL. “I remember being mortally frightened. I was afraid both for my own life and for the lives of my parents. I understood that I was losing a lot. I had to come to terms with the fact that I might never see my close people again.
But when you are 20 years old, it seems that only good things lie ahead. Of course, I wanted to improve my life, take a step forward, and at the same time I felt that I could not do it at home – neither as a hockey player nor as a person. I desperately wanted to try myself in the NHL. Before me opened the cherished door that I so wanted to look into. In Stockholm I was given a chance that comes once in a lifetime, and I took it. And today I am very grateful to America and Canada for everything they have done for me. But at the same time, in my soul I always was and remain Russian – albeit with an American passport.”