Soccer in Bolivia can be a breathless experience

Diego Maradona was a good sport, saying his team was simply outplayed. But the Argentine manager’s star player, Lionel Messi, was perhaps more honest.
Heavyweight Argentina’s historic 6-1 defeat this week to soccer flyweight Bolivia in the rarefied air of the Andes reopens a politically charged debate about whether teams can reasonably be expected to play in such extreme conditions.
Messi’s description of struggling through 90 breathless minutes at nearly 12,000 feet above sea level in La Paz, the world’s highest capital city, needed no translation.
“Es imposible,” said the usually swift attacker who finished with head bowed, clutching his thighs.
“Some of us had a terrible headache, though we don’t want to use that as an excuse,” added Argentine defender Javier Zanetti, who plays his club soccer in Milan, Italy—not even a mere 400 feet up.The Bolivians, of course, would beg to differ with Messi’s suggestion that the low-oxygen conditions of their capital make it unsuitable for fair soccer.
And the irony of the worst Argentine defeat in World Cup qualifying— eclipsing a 5-0 loss to Colombia in 1993—was that Maradona has helped campaign for such matches.
A year ago, as soccer’s governing body was trying to outlaw high-altitude international games, Maradona played an hourlong charity match in La Paz’s Hernando Siles Stadium with Bolivia’s soccer-mad president, Evo Morales, to prove it wasn’t impossible.
“I speak for all of Argentina when I say that we do not fear the altitude,” Maradona said then. “All of us have to play where were we were born.”
This week, Maradona again insisted that altitude was not an issue in the 6-1 thrashing.
“Every Bolivian goal was a dagger in my heart,” he said, but “basically they were the better team.”
The truth probably lies somewhere between Messi and Maradona’s stances. And the headache is for FIFA because it will have to draw the line.
The problem with banning La Paz and other such venues is that altitude is just one of many factors that influence the outcomes of games. Pushed to extremes, there’s almost no limit to such arguments.
Should Hong Kong or Bangkok be banned as too humid, hot and polluted? Is it reasonable to play in chilly Norway? Is it fair that smaller, impoverished nations be thrown to the richer, larger lions of soccer? While La Paz offers Bolivia an altitude advantage, the country of just 10 million people doesn’t have a giant pool of soccer talent like Brazil or the financial leg-up that European giants enjoy.
FIFA has temporarily suspended the altitude ban, bowing to pressure from Morales and others in South America, while it considers a possible package of laws to regulate the playing of international and domestic club matches under a variety of “extreme” environmental conditions.
FIFA medical committee chairman Michel D’Hooghe expects to present findings in coming months. He won’t reveal whether the ban on venues such as La Paz will be reinstated but says playing at such heights clearly offers home teams an “artificial advantage,” even if it doesn’t endanger health.
“It is not a matter of life or death,” D’Hooghe said in a phone interview. “It is just a difference in performance level.”
Scientific and historical data suggest the disadvantages can be huge when low-altitude visitors don’t have time to acclimatize, as the Argentines didn’t. They arrived just two hours before kickoff in the hope of limiting headaches and nausea.
The thin air doesn’t just mess with visitors’ bodies, it also affects how balls play. With reduced air resistance, they fly further and curve less— perhaps helping to explain why the Argentines lost their deft touch.
Oxford University mathematician Patrick McSharry, in findings published in the British Medical Journal, calculated that as altitude climbs, home teams score more and concede less, with each additional 3,280 feet increasing the goal difference by almost half a goal. McSharry studied 1,460 international matches played in South America by 10 teams from 1900-2004.
Peruvian high-altitude researcher Gustavo Gonzales calculated that visiting teams lost or drew in 15 games played on the same day they arrived in La Paz or the Bolivian city of Oruro from 1950-93. Oruro is so high that revelers at its annual carnival wear masks with bulging eyes to represent how slave miners there in bygone times struggled to breathe.
So Messi’s complaints about La Paz may not be far off the mark. But the problem is that they also go to the heart of soccer’s’s identity as a universal game, meant to be playable anywhere by any 22 people with a ball.
La Paz is a tough venue, but attempting to level soccer’s playing field by banning it would be tough on Bolivia, too.
Ultimately, this boils down not only to deciding where to draw the line, but whether such lines should be drawn at all.
John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester@ap.org.