“The best thing that can happen to an amputee is to forget that he is one”

It’s been eight years since Eduardo Meléndez, the founder of this team, was born again. He almost lost his life when a car hit his motorcycle, and after a three-month coma, he said goodbye to his right arm. When he woke up, everything had changed. “I had to start from scratch,” he recalls. After undergoing sixteen surgeries, it took him more than a year to relearn how to walk and talk.

To Edward, football saved his life when he was about to take it off. He began playing in El Salvador, where his teammates’ amputations were mainly due to mines and bombs. “Mine, compared to theirs, was nothing. Stepping on a mine or being shot with a gun are horrible things,” he says. When he emigrated to Madrid, he founded the team that he has been training for a year and which joins the other two for amputees in Spain.

Watching his five dragons pass the ball around on the field, he remembers that this sport saved his life. This time they train at the Orcasur Municipal Sports Center, but they also do it in Lavapiés, where the initiative was born, or in Retiro. It’s not easy for them to find a place to play, but thanks to the club they were able to access these options.

Dragones de Lavapiés approximately dand six hundred athletes from sixty countries. Among its multiple teams, there is one for amputees, one for the homeless, three with a majority of refugees, one queer and one woman. With pride, the director, Dolores Galindo, says that the children win every game.

For her, teams are a reflection of the neighborhood and, in addition to a way to grow in sport, a way to generate connections and cohesion between those who have not found a place to do so. “We, the families of the neighborhood, do all this with the support of organizations and institutions, especially European ones. It costs less to understand us from afar than up close,” says Dolores.

Bringing amputee football to future players has not been an easy task. José Conde was an active witness to the entire process and remained there from the beginning. At sixteen, he was diagnosed with cancer and his adolescence was spent in hospital rooms until the age of twenty-one. He was about to die. It was he himself who, on the recommendation of doctors, decided to let go of part of himself. It’s been fourteen years since he lived on one leg, and he had to relearn how to live. “I didn’t know how to walk, I didn’t know how to go down the stairs. Now I work, but before I couldn’t. It started when I was a little boy, from scratch,” he says.

He also performed before cancer changed his life. It was a passion, a dream. “When I came back to play football, that spiritual part was reborn. Rediscovering this sport, even with only one leg, is like rediscovering a part of that youth that I lost in the hospital,” he said after a long run with the ball.

His teammate Felipe Duque is the member who has been with the team for the shortest time. When he was twenty years old, a workplace accident involving agricultural machinery required the amputation of his right leg above the knee. “When I was in the machine, I was aware of what was happening and I told a colleague who was with me that I was not going to die, that I wanted to continue studying and working,” he recalls.

After moving to Madrid, he started selling candy on the street and that’s how Eduardo found him, who offered him the chance to become one of the dragons. There he meets those who make up his team and with whom he shares not only the terrain, but also experiences. One of them is Jesús Orea who, with more experience behind him, supports him in his learning. He had to have his tibia amputated at the age of nineteen, also following a work accident.

Jesus is strong in his words, we must move forward. Sitting on the bench, wearing the team’s yellow T-shirt and navy shorts, he admits that at first he was embarrassed to wear clothes that showed his amputation. A feeling that has already rusted, just like the memory of his life on two legs. Twenty-five years were enough to forget. “The best thing that can happen to an amputee is to forget that he is one,” he says.

There is still much to do. This is what Condé believes, even if he trusts good initiatives, he maintains that lack of work “especially in the area of ​​social awareness and infrastructure.” Yet they all agree that, in one way or another, football made them want to try again. “If they didn’t know this sport, they would be in bed with all kinds of problems, but when we get on the field we forget all the problems,” explains the coach.

Amputees from Madrid with Ukraine

With their game, they have become a support for those who, from a young age, are forced to face the same things as back then. Sometimes, amputee children, excluded from their schools because of their condition and who have been made to believe that they are not capable of playing, join their training. “He sees people like him playing football, we ask him to play and this boy’s face lights up,” Condé says without hiding a smile.

They are the example they wanted to have and will be again next year, when they welcome amputees to their team victims of the Ukrainian war who lost a limb because of it. The main beneficiaries of the initiative will be “civilians or veterans”, citizens of all genders and ages suffering from amputations or congenital conditions.

The dragons will organize suitable training and training sessions, for which they will benefit from the advice of the European Amputee Football Federation (EAFF). The project, entitled Empowering Recovery: Adaptive Football for All (ERAFA) and funded by the European Unionseeks to ensure that amputees in Ukraine find in football the tool for rehabilitation and cohesion that they have found. A way of bringing their experiences to those who, because of the conflict, have recently said goodbye to a part of themselves.