Frenzy 3 - River Plate vs Boca Juniors

Winner: No one???

How unfortunate that the sleuthing capabilities of the frenzied couldn't come up with an answer - or rather, with THE answer. C Love came closest, sort of, in that she actually recognized the sport being played, and was relatively close, continent-wise. I'm tempted to award her the snocone, but....no. Knowing Crystal, she will certainly win many cones over the next year, so to recognize her closity on this challenge - Cystal, you get a double shot of flavor squeezins on one of your winning cones.

As to the actual matchup, the video shows snippets from a match between what is probably the fiercest rivalry of any two sports teams on the planet: the Argentine professional soccer teams based in Buenos Aires, River Plate and Boca Juniors. I went, last January, to a "friendly" (if any match between these two could really be called such) in the resort town of Mar del Plata on the Atlantic coast a couple of hours south of Buenos Aires.

The atmosphere is practically indescribable; "electric" understates things to a ridiculous degree. "Dangerous" is another word that really fails to convey the reality of the situation. Many fans have died in fan-on-fan violence in recent years. These people are serious, and too often, deadly serious. One of the Argentines I went with just shook his head sadly when I asked about how fans would react after the match - there is no such thing as congratulations and "well-played" - winners will taunt the losers mercilessly, and the losers often respond with clubs, rocks, knives, or anything else they can get their hands on.

Extraordinary measures are being taken to try and prevent any recurrence of deadly encounters. Before the match, fans are physically segregated, and two separate entrances are used by fans for each side. The stadium is split evenly in half, and fans are routed to one side of the stadium or the other based on which tickets they hold. At the match in Mar del Plata, there were several hundred police mounted on horseback and wearing riot gear separating the crowd and threatening anyone who showed any sign of possibly crossing the line they had drawn.

Everyone is searched before entering the stadium, and they are thorough searches. If I were an Islamo-Fascist of recent lore, I think I'd have to kill a couple of the guards to restore honor to my family. Apparently though, while weapons were definitely not allowed, fireworks and incendiary devices were OK. (More on that in a minute.)

Once the crowd was in the stadium, a process that took over 2 hours, the police, still in riot gear, sat in the aisles at midfield that separated the two crowds, and vigorously responded to any move from either side. They were ready to beat the hell out of anyone who had even the slightest thought of beating the hell out of anyone.

But.....I'm painting a bleak picture.

How about this: everyone, whether possessing any interest in sport or not, should attend at least one soccer match in South America in their lifetime. The River-Boca match was an incredible experience - electric, charged, whatever you call it - the atmosphere was stimulation in its purest form: animalistic in a way of being both the hunter and the hunted. It is a feast of stimulation - hours of non-stop singing and chanting, bouncing up and down in place, every now and then being lifted off your feet by the sheer surge of the crowd, fire, fire everywhere - there wasn't a single minute of the match when something wasn't on fire in the stadium, people waving red flares in the River end, and blue and gold flares for Boca, hand held roman candles erupting with flares barely streaming over head, and all the while still the singing and chanting, the rhythms demanding movement.

It's sensory overload in everything that means - stretching you to the edge of a rending, fraying pleasure, and the closer you get to that edge, the more energy flows from your deepest, survivalist reserves. It's the running of the bulls, it's blasting into space in a rocket, it's your first skydiving freefall - it's being right on the edge of "Holy shit, I could die here" but being so overwhelmed with a shared euphoria, none of it matters. It's living, baby.

Let me know when you're going; I'll meet you there.