Five years later: this is how it ended with the football players who were rescued from a Thai cave in front of the world | Abroad

Recently, the football players of the ‘Wild Boar’ football team, their coach and relatives gathered again for a memorial ceremony at the cave in Tham Luang Khun Nam Nang Non National Park, in the far north of Thailand. There, photos of three absentees were revealed: captain Duangphet ‘Dom’ Promthep and soldiers Saman Kunan and Bayroot Pakbara, commandos of the Thai navy who died in the rescue work.

‘Dom’ (all footballers had a nickname) passed away completely unexpectedly early this year at the age of 17 in Leicester, England, due to a head injury. The most talented football player on the team had been awarded a scholarship to the Brook House Football Academy after the cave drama. Dom’s exact cause of death was not disclosed; it turned out later that the boy had to be cremated in England in order to reduce the costs of flying the body over to Thailand.

Navy Seal Kunan (37), who brought oxygen bottles to the boys but drowned himself, had already been given a statue at the cave. His colleague Pakbara contracted a blood infection during the rescue operation, which would prove fatal for him a year and a half later. During the commemoration ceremony, 39 Thai monks made offerings to ‘the sacred elements of the cave’.

The survivors have since made the most of the extra playing time they were given. Their families made great deals with Western film companies. The environment of the cave didn’t get any worse either. After an extra long closure due to corona, 1.8 million visitors came to it last year – before the drama of the football players, there were an average of 40,000 annually. A free shuttle bus daily drives hundreds of tourists from the parking lot to the entrance of the cave, where all kinds of souvenirs are sold.

A piece of cave has been recreated in a shopping center for tourists. Remarkable walking tours are also offered there, in an environment that is nevertheless known as dangerous because of all imaginable illegalities. Because this is also the so-called ‘Golden Triangle’, or the lawless twilight zone between Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, infested with drug traffickers and trigger-happy militias.

But how have the boys fared since then? Three of them, ‘Mark’, ‘Tee’ and ‘Dul’, gave the cave drama an official right to exist. Before the cave adventure, they were stateless, just like their trainer Ekkaphon ‘Eak’ Kanthawong (30). Many residents of the Golden Triangle have difficulty obtaining identity papers, which means that they are excluded from all kinds of basic services. For example, traveling is impossible due to lack of papers. But not anymore for the boys and their trainer, because they still got Thai nationality after their adventure.

Coach ‘Eak’ was criticized for taking the lads into the cave despite the rain. But all was forgiven him. Meditation techniques allowed him to calm his players and slow down their breathing. It gave them oxygen for longer in the side cave where the team waited on a ledge for rescue. It looked bad for the boys. Due to the early and heavy monsoon, the kilometers of tunnels in the cave had turned into an underground river.

The rescue operation would eventually take two weeks. Two British cave divers, John Volanthen and Rick Stanton, concluded that the only way to save the boys was to render them unconscious with drugs (ketamine) – to prevent them from panicking during the perilous retreat and endangering themselves and their rescuers. to take. Like constricted mummies (wearing breathing masks), the stunned players were sometimes pushed through the mud and eerily narrow passages. Volanthen and Stanton were later awarded a High British Medal of Military Valor by Queen Elizabeth.

Finally, on July 10, 2018, the last four boys and the coach were rescued from the cave. Trainer ‘Eak’ now runs a football academy for underprivileged boys who dream of a football career. His pupils also receive good education, in case it does not work out with the ball. Titan, who was 11 years old at the time and the youngest of the group, is still training for a career as a professional footballer. The slightly older ‘Tee’ was the only one who actually turned professional, at the Thai Third Division club Chiangrai Lanna. Other boys from the cave, now aged between 18 and 21, say in interviews that they want to study or join the army. A few want to become a diver.

After the death of leader ‘Dom’, ‘Dul’, real name: Adun Sam-on, became the new face of the group. He was also the only one who spoke English during the evacuation from the cave, which greatly helped the British rescuers. Dul received a scholarship to study in New York. He was more or less adopted by a wealthy American family and is thinking hard about working for the United Nations. That would also be appropriate, because the help for his rescue came from many countries, including the Netherlands.