The story of the first Olympic goal

Olympic goals are possibly the most difficult goals for a footballer. It's a goal scored directly from a corner kick without any other player - on either team - touching or otherwise deflecting the ball into the goal. Only the most daring and talented athletes dare to look for the goalkeeper's goal with a devilish parabola that sends the ball into the back of the net. Great footballers have achieved it, Mohamed Salah, Ángel Di María, Roberto Carlos, Toni Kross, Ferenc Puskás, Diego Armando Maradona, among others. Interestingly, neither Cristiano Ronaldo nor Lionel Messi (two of the best in history) have managed to convert an Olympic goal.

The first Olympic goal in history occurred in 1924, a few weeks after the Olympic Games in Paris. That year, Uruguay won the gold medal after beating Switzerland 3-0 and became Olympic Champion. In 1924, the FIFA World Cup had not yet been created, so being an Olympic champion was the highest achievement at the national team level. A month later, as a reason to celebrate that feat, two friendly matches were organized between Uruguay and Argentina; one in Montevideo (Uruguay's capital) and another in Buenos Aires (Argentina's capital).

The first match was played on September 21 in Montevideo and ended 1-1. Almost 2 weeks later, the rematch was played in Buenos Aires, at the Sportivo Barracas stadium. Fifteen minutes into the first half, Huracán's Argentine striker Cesáreo Onzari hit from the corner, directly on goal. No one touched the ball and it slipped into the Uruguayan goalkeeper's goal. The Uruguayan football players were paralyzed, they could not believe what had just happened. All the players and fans in the stadium witnessed the first Olympic goal in history.

Finally, Argentina won the match 2-1, but the victory was the least of it since all the journalists only wrote about that "impossible" goal. At that time this goal was known as "Onzari's goal to the Olympics". "I could never score another goal like that. It was the best of my goals because of the repercussion it had and the astonishment of the people", explained Onzari. As time went on, more players began to achieve this feat, leading the media to call it the "Olympic goal", in honor of the goal scored against the Olympic champion.

The only Olympic goal scored in a FIFA World Cup was scored by Colombian Marco Coll on June 3, at the 1962 World Cup in Chile, in a match between Colombia and the Soviet Union. Coll scored an Olympic goal against goalkeeper Lev Yashin, then considered the best goalkeeper in the world (and probably in history). Another interesting detail is that only one player scored this goal during the Olympic Games. It was Megan Rapinoe and she did it twice: in London 2012, against Canada, and in Tokyo 2021, against Australia.

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