“No one has died from playing at altitude.” I use the phrase of Carlos Salvador Bilardo, legendary Argentine coach, world champion in 1986 and paradigm of scholar, meticulous and genius of this game, as a pretext to affirm without further ado the evidence that by playing soccer at altitude no one has died. .
According to the criteria of
Bilardo, who is also a doctor who graduated from the University of La Plata, said it in December 2007 when Fifa, under pressure from Brazil and Uruguay, prohibited playing official matches at more than 2,750 meters above sea level, to rule out La Paz and its 3,640 meters. Now, look, La Paz seems like a hot land compared to El Alto, the new local headquarters of Bolivia, with its 4,150 meters closer to the stars.
There, the Colombian National Team will play next Thursday at the close of the first round of the 2026 World Cup qualifying round, and Now it turns out that, as is repeated in several of the specialized spaces, this is “a loseable game” supposedly because it is played in the heights of the Andes.
In that way? Is it loseable against Bolivia? Oh really? It will never be a loseable game against Bolivia or playing on Everest!
The lid sweats more than the pot, the saying goes. Popular wisdom is magnificent and absolute. What are we going to resign ourselves to? How does the umbrella open? Why are they cleaning up milk that hasn’t been spilled?
Bolivia’s figures playing at home: only one game in El Alto!
If it is because Bolivia beat Venezuela 4-0 last month in the first match in qualifying history in El Alto, then it seems to me an excess of cowardice or a desire to look good to the coach and the team.
In La Paz, Bolivia played 84 qualifying matches in its entire history: it won 42 (50%), tied 20 (23.8%) and lost 22 (26.19%). In El Alto he has a ‘perfect count’ of one match and one win: 100% performance, ha!
Always Ready, the new team from El Alto, for example, has played 24 Libertadores games with 5 wins (21%), 4 draws (17%) and 15 losses (62%). That the game is loseable? They send shell!
Here is a truth: the higher the altitude, the less oxygen and lower atmospheric pressure. This being the case, it is necessary to make economy of effort to recover better, knowing that to catch the air after an effort (a sprint, an intense run, a change of pace), it will take longer to catch the air to do other. And, well, the ball moves differently: it is faster, it bounces differently, it flies more, and it “bends” less. And so Colombia has played in La Paz and only lost once.
Colombia is in Cochabamba (2,558 meters), which is like being in Bogotá (2,625). He rented a hyperbaric chamber and the hypoxia measurement and assessment equipment, and on Thursday he will go up to El Alto.
And there, you know, you have to play tight and try to get the ball to pass it to your teammate’s foot, paying attention to shots from distance and crosses. As Bilardo said, “the ball must circulate, the ball must run and not the footballers.”
That the game is loseable just because? Don’t fuck around! “It would only be justified if the death of a footballer had occurred, but I don’t know of any case. No one has died from playing at altitude,” stated that football paradigm called Carlos Salvador Bilardo.
Meluk tells him…
GABRIEL MELUK
Sports Editor
@MelukLeCuenta
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