The noise from the middle tier of the stand at the Spartak Stadium was strangely persistent, rising above the pre-match hum of Argentina versus Iceland in Moscow, the pitch a humid pocket of shade, the far end still pounded by heavy mid-afternoon sun.
It was a banging noise. And a rattling noise. And a yelling noise. People had already begun to turn and point. Looking up, the first thing you saw from below was the fold of chins and sub-chins. Then it was the cigar, protruding like a gun snub above the lip of the balcony. And finally it was the face of Diego Maradona craning over the rail, arms spread in a papal gesture, and looking like, if not the most excited man of all time, then surely the most excited man yet.
It would be incorrect to say Maradona continued to have a really great time across the entire 90 minutes. He definitely took some breaks. The key moment, for this awe-struck hack, came at the end of the game. Hurrying inside, I passed him on the stairs. At first it looked like Maradona was slumped, but this was more a resting than a slumping. Someone had just clanged through the door next to him. In that moment it was me and El Diego alone in a stairwell.
I loved Diego Maradona. I think love is appropriate here. With Maradona it felt personal. From the first time you saw him, you just knew you’d have to follow every single thing he ever did, that every sports person, athlete, performer would now be measured against the ideal of that grainy, gliding figure in the hard white light of Mexico 86, moving through the matrix of mortal human World Cup footballers like a superhero, bending the day, the game, the physics of it all to his will.
There was no question in that moment of talking to Maradona. Instead, as it became clear this would be inevitable, given the need to walk up the stairs, I smelled Maradona. What did he smell of? Sweat. Chemical cosmetic product. And a generalised smell I can only describe as “man”. Maradona smelt of man.
To be clear, I didn’t choose to smell Maradona. But I did let it happen, allowing the airborne Diego molecules to enter my nostril. To this day I am convinced some tiny sub-particle of me is still made up of Maradona molecules. Just as by reading this paragraph some part of your own brain, the valve that dissolves written thought-words into the lateral think-puddle (this is science) is also Maradona smell. So good luck with that and you’re welcome.
It would become a familiar spectacle over the next 10 days. Maradona was at the World Cup on a $10,000-per-day Fifa legend junket. His appearances were often upsetting and uncontrolled. He was treated by paramedics at half-time in the Nigeria game for something he dismissed as “neck strain”. He seemed hyper-Diego. He looked like a man trying very hard to be present; or indeed on his way to somewhere else.
Maradona died a year and half later aged 60. The reason for coming back to him now is that while his life was always difficult, his afterlife has become a horror story. Maradona has been worshipped, demonised and mourned. Right now he’s being litigated. The tax, inheritance and intellectual property wrangles continue to circle. And this week there was another startling twist in the ongoing desecration of Maradona’s death.
The more sensational headlines have suggested his demise has been “linked to cocaine”. This isn’t strictly true. There has already been a major inquiry into his death by a 20-person panel. In 2021 this concluded that his medical team had acted in a “reckless” way, something they all deny.
In April last year it was announced that Maradona’s doctor, Maradona’s neurosurgeon, Maradona’s psychiatrist, Maradona’s psychologist , Maradona’s home help, Maradona’s care co-ordinator and Maradona’s two chief nurses would go on trial for an offence that translates as “simple homicide” over their actions during his extended endgame, with a possible 25-year sentence if convicted. The trial is due to begin in June.
Maradona’s neurosurgeon, Leopoldo Luque, has now commissioned a separate medical review. According to this report, made public this week, Maradona’s pre-death erratic heartbeat may have originated in an “external” source, with the implication, several leaps of logic later, that some unidentified party gave him cocaine while he was lying in what would become his death bed.
The prosecutors have already dismissed this conclusion. Dr Luque, who was filmed announcing tearfully shortly after his death: “If I’m responsible for anything with Diego it was loving him,” has been captured in leaked WhatsApp messages from around the same time telling a business partner: “The fat man’s going to end up kicking the bucket.”
And yes, this is all horrendous, unsurprising and entirely consistent with Maradona’s life, from the impoverished childhood to the buffetings of his career, to the current restless spirit, a body no one seems to want to lay to rest.
It is a body you feel you know intimately just from seeing the clips so many times, that way of walking and turning and jumping, the divine intelligence of his feet. It is also a body that was constantly marked, from the Andoni Goikoetxea tackle that broke Maradona’s ankle “with a sound like wood snapping”, to the endlessly injected knees, the narcotic abuse, the bouts of illness.
Not to mention the record 53 fouls at a single (triumphant) World Cup. These were not fouls you “win” or “draw” but shin-gougers and leg-rakers. It is in part why Maradona will remain the most thrilling footballer you could hope to see. To be this good in this way, to play like some superhuman matador, out there making the game up off the cuff, always moving through his own lighter air, was also an act of physical bravery, a constant high-wire act.
This was not a time when star players could expect to score 40 goals and win the league every year, stewarded by sports science and sympathetic refereeing. It was necessary to ration your strength, to seize the right moments. Mexico 86 was the reward for Maradona. It would also take him into the strangest of places, and on now into this final chapter of blame and neglect.
Maradona was awful in Russia. He did all the wrong things. But perhaps the most galling part was a sniffy public statement from Fifa urging guests to behave “in a respectful manner” – presumably while occupying its own playboy stage constructed for the greater glory of Gianni Infantino’s great friend Vladimir Putin. What Maradona really needed was protection, for his sport to look after him; not to be lionised or left to the energies that would steadily chase him down.
That body was crammed full of painkilling drugs when it finally winked out, then paraded through Buenos Aires before three days of public mourning. Maradona’s post-death will remain for now a toxic sideshow, his life an indictment of a sport that is always hungry, always leaping up in its box to feed the spectacle, but which retains the hardest of edges.
