Hillsborough’s Tragedy Fosters Life-Saving Improvement for Soccer

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/sports/soccer/14iht-hillsboro14.html

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LONDON — How safe and secure do we feel, or should we feel, attending major sporting events?

It now appears inevitable that criminal proceedings will follow the fresh claims that negligence and mismanagement by the police and emergency services contributed to the deaths of 96 people at Hillsborough soccer stadium in England in April 1989.

The weight of the evidence, accumulated from statements and documents previously hidden from the public, must then be challenged under cross examination.

To see justice done, if it can be done after all this time, we will have to re-live the tragedy that still haunts the families of those who died, and still chills those who witnessed it in the arena.

Even now, 23 years later, the families wait for the whole truth.

It is little comfort to them to know that, because of Hillsborough, the stadiums in most developed countries are safer places. The outcome of that catastrophe — described by the British prime minister, David Cameron, as the nation’s worst peace time tragedy — is that spectators are no longer corralled like cattle into overcrowded steel pens.

No one is allowed to stand at soccer games in England, or in much of Europe, any more. The buildings are, by law, more modern and structurally sound. The stewarding of the crowds is better rehearsed, the medical facilities stringently regulated, and, we trust, the security forces know how to save spectators, even from their own worst excesses.

All this cannot salve the pain and anger of relatives of the 96, or indeed of the hundreds of survivors who bear the scars, sometimes mental, of having to claw their way out of the crush that should never have happened.

One dreads to think of the trauma yet to come when those people who lost loved ones at Hillsborough do seek “justice” through the courts.

One shudders at the many times there was a near miss in other stadiums — a fight among over-excited fanatics, a collapsing piece of masonry, a rusted old metal barrier buckling.

One fears — often — in places like France, which still hems in volatile factions separated by steel fencing. Or in South America, or Africa, where there simply isn’t the money to pour billions into stadium infrastructure.

In England, at least, it is safer and more pleasant to be a supporter. Over the past two months, a million people watched the London Olympic Games, and another million attended the equally thrilling Paralympics.

Wonderful sport in magnificent, if monumentally costly, arenas.

Soccer was a small part of that. Soccer is by far the richest sports business on earth. It has never redistributed its wealth, which one way or another comes from the fans.

The world is awash with stories of corrupt soccer leadership. The financial gap between those who play and those who pay to watch was never more disparate.

Yet there is one lucky fellow, a player, who is alive today in huge part because tragedies such as Hillsborough forced the authorities to ensure that medical facilities, and knowledge, was at hand.

His name is Fabrice Muamba. The 24-year-old player, originally from Zaire, suffered cardiac arrest while playing for Bolton Wanderers at Tottenham in North London last March.

He was clinically dead on the field. But a team of eight experienced medical workers, led by a cardiac consultant who happened to be in the audience, saved Muamba.

They were able to do so because they had every first aid appliance known to science.

They could shock his stilled heart with a defibrillator that was immediately to hand. The heart specialist, a Tottenham fan, was able to leap a small barrier and rush to the scene because there was no inhibiting fencing.

Those first-aiders — the specialist and the two team doctors taking the lead — were able to keep working to revive the heart despite the momentary hitch of an unattended police vehicle blocking the emergency entrance to the field.

Great work all around. Muamba was saved, though he subsequently retired.

He is, though, a happy survivor. His story is both chastening and uplifting because it shows that none of us can be certain of life, but on the other hand we are capable of making even a century-old stadium like Tottenham’s as safe as it needs to be for human enjoyment.

I suspect that in the months, possibly years, of further heartache to come for the Liverpool families, this is going to be even harder to take.

Their tragedy helped in no small way to force sport to face its obligation toward people coming to the stadium — to play or to watch.

The mistakes witnessed at Hillsborough will be examined and cross examined until one side or the other in the legal joust is declared the winner.

What then?

Some of the police officers who failed in leadership, and then covered up their mistakes, will have left service and might even have died.

Others might be put in the dock. But nothing, surely, can be worse than that horrible, makeshift morgue 23 years ago when the bodies of men, women and children were laid out in a gymnasium beside the stadium — with neither enough expertise or facilities to revive them.