Soccer: Crippled Togo goalkeeper Kodjovi Obilale's plight is sport's shame

LORIENT, France — Terrorist bullets shattered his spine, football's indifference shattered his faith.

"It's a rotten world," says Kodjovi Obilale, Togo's once-strapping goalkeeper left in a wheelchair by the attack on his team's bus at Africa's showcase tournament, the Cup of Nations, in January.

After eight long and, for Obilale, dispiriting months, during which time he went under the surgeon's knife six times, world football's governing body FIFA is now, finally, promising "concrete" help for the player who feels that he has been utterly forsaken by those who organized the Africa Cup in Angola.

"Excuse my language, but I think that is a bit disgusting. If I was a famous player like (Chelsea's Didier) Drogba and the others, I don't think things would have happened like this," Obilale told The Associated Press in an interview this week at his hospital on western France's Atlantic coast.

"I find it a bit abhorrent and sickening that they have abandoned me," he says.

Two assault-rifle bullets "this big," Obilale says, holding up a cigar-sized middle finger, hit his back, smashing two vertebrae and slicing through his intestines and bladder on their high-velocity path through his body. Surgeons repaired the stomach wounds, leaving on his smooth black skin a gnarly, raised scar two fingers thick from trouser-top to rib cage. But the crush-damage to his spinal cord is likely irreversible.

"I used to have enormous thighs," he says. They're spindly now.

He cannot move his right leg below the knee nor feel its foot and toes. With his plate-sized hands and muscular arms that once defended Togo's goal, Obilale hoists the dead leg onto a bed where his cheerful physiotherapist, Marie Penven, sets about stretching, pulling and flexing his limbs and joints. The daily routine prevents Obilale's withered muscles from seizing up completely from lack of use, she explains. Her vigor and soft bare feet are, inadvertently, an insolent reminder of the formidable physical abilities Obilale has lost.

"I used to wear XXL now it's L. I've become a fashion model, thin legs," he jokes.

But his humor deserts him as he shifts gingerly and painfully from the bed to a nearby set of parallel bars where, gripping hard with both hands, he shuffles along upright in what cannot, yet and may never, be called a walk.

"Ouuuch!" he winces. "Oh, what a life ... My gosh."