World of Football: A brief history of the ‘Olympic goal’

When Joe Jacobson watched the ball sail into the top corner of the Lincoln net on Saturday afternoon, he probably assumed he would have a monopoly on dead-ball mania for a few days.

It was the international break, after all, and the Wycombe left-back had just completed a remarkable hat-trick, scoring three goals direct from set pieces. And not a penalty among them, either: the first was a devilish free-kick, whipped in at the near post; the second and third both came from – yes! – corners.

Global recognition surely awaited, if only in the currency of retweets and likes.

Yet by Sunday morning, Jacobson had serious competition.

Quantity was on his side, but in terms of pure quality, he was surely trumped by Leandro Carvalho, a forward for Brazilian top-flight side Ceara.

Carvalho also scored direct from a corner. But where Jacobson’s second and third owed plenty to luck – one really should have been marked down as an own goal, and a timely gust of wind ought to claim an assist on the other – this was an act of pure, uncut bravura. Carvalho (above) spotted Corinthians goalkeeper Cassio minimally out of position and, with the outside of his boot, hit a flat, swerving shot that kissed the near post on its way in.

Vai bater no @MuseeLouvre, este vídeo. Oui?
📽️ Premiere#CearáTimedoPovo pic.twitter.com/Jqq2ivy7m0

— Ceará Sporting Club – Time do Povo (@CearaSC) September 7, 2019

That Carvalho’s strike was also an added-time equaliser was a bonus, but goals scored directly from corners have an intrinsic allure that transcends their context.

Jacobson and Carvalho may have little in common but they now share membership of an exclusive club of transgressors and mavericks – men and women who have looked common sense in the face and laughed.

In broad, layman’s terms, you should not be able to score from a corner.

You cannot see more than the thinnest sliver of the goal from your starting position. Even if you manage to direct an effort on target, the penalty box is full of players who are keen – indeed, often desperate – to interrupt the ball’s trajectory. One of them is allowed to use their hands to do so and really, really doesn’t want to be embarrassed.

To say the odds are stacked against the taker is to understate things by an order of magnitude.

Before June 1924, scoring from corners was illegal, never mind improbable. But an alteration to the Laws of the Game forced the doors open a crack, and it wasn’t long before plucky dreamers were piling through them.

Those frontier years are fuzzy and imprecise – no Opta dead-ball stats here, folks – but common legend has it that the first such goal was scored by Argentina forward Cesareo Onzari, just a few short months after the rule change. According to reports, he snuck a curling, dipping effort in at the near post during a friendly against Uruguay.

The shock of the beaten goalkeeper, Antonio Mazzali, was echoed by Onzari himself.

“To be honest, when I saw the ball go in I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Maybe the goalkeeper got out of the wrong side of the bed that day, or there were players blocking his path, because I never scored a goal like that again.”

The moment did reverberate through the ages, however. The Argentine press, delighted by their team’s victory over the reigning Olympic champions, dubbed Onzari’s strike a ‘gol olimpico‘ (Olympic goal), a term that is still widely used today in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries to describe such efforts.

It is instructive that South Americans have an actual name for this. First – and again, this is no scientific study – they just seem to have scored a lot more of them than, say, Europeans have. Marcos Coll of Colombia netted the only gol olimpico in a World Cup match, beating Russia’s Lev Yashin in 1962. YouTube is positively bursting with videos of household names who have managed the feat: Roberto Carlos, Zico, Ronaldinho, Diego Maradona, Juan Roman Riquelme.

Then there are the serial offenders.

Alvaro Recoba, that vampy sapling of a playmaker, scored six.

“It makes no difference if there are players on the posts,” he explained after his final killer corner, for Nacional in 2015. “The ball comes in dipping and spinning, and generally teams don’t put tall players on the line anyway. If I hit it well, it’s very hard for an outfield player to stop unless he’s hanging from the crossbar.”

But even Recoba’s achievements pale in comparison to those of Dejan Petkovic, a Serbian-born midfielder who is seen as a de facto Brazilian (and thus handily lands on the right side of this argument). He racked up no fewer than nine in his adopted country. The Joe Jacobsons of this world have a way to go just yet.

This evidence is, of course, all just circumstantial, and it should be noted that players from elsewhere have also contributed to the cause.

Former Blackburn midfielder Morten Gamst Pedersen claimed to have netted six Olympic goals in a single match at junior level. Massimo Palanca, who once helped modest Catanzaro finish ninth in Serie A, insists on his website he scored 13 of them over the course of his career. One of the most memorable individual strikes, meanwhile, came from the boot of one Megan Rapinoe. In the actual Olympics. Proper Inception stuff.

But the widespread use of such a snappy term (Olympic goal! Come on!) to describe the phenomenon is at least proof that South Americans lead the way in one aspect of football: the art of myth-making. This is a continent that is always willing to celebrate party tricks and make space for them in the lexicon of the sport.

Take Brazil, for instance.

Didi, the great midfielder of the 1950s, was famous for his ‘dry leaf’ free-kick, a shot that gently floated over the wall before dipping into the net. Roberto Rivellino had his elastico. More recently, there was Kerlon, who shot to fame courtesy of the ‘seal dribble’ – a deeply idiotic skill, but unmistakably his.

The gol olimpico is less proprietary, but no less cool for that fact. And while the cynics could argue that there are, in fact, a whole range of English phrases that capture its essence (“You lucky bastard!” might just about cover it), it is hard to argue the term itself, with its foreign mystique and arcane backstory, lends the whole enterprise just that little more charm.

So welcome, Joe Jacobson. Take a seat over there, next to Leandro Carvalho. You’re one of the gang now. But for heaven’s sake, when you’re 70 years old and talking to your grandkids, don’t tell them that you once scored from two corners in the same match.

Tell them you scored two Olympic goals.

(Photo: Alexandre Schneider/Getty Images)