Soccer Player Struck By Lightning, Thought Dead, Says He Survived

Joao Contreras Fuentes is either one lucky son of a bitch or tops on God's shit list, take your pick. He was playing soccer for the club Sport Aguila in the Copa Peru when a bolt of lighting leaped from Zeus' fingertip and basically erased Fuentes in the fashion of blowing out a candle. The bolt ignited and vanished so quickly, the camera doesn't even really capture it.

In throwback Monty Burns fashion, the player was originally reported dead by local media (the Mirror pins the misinformation on his club). Presumably then he was then taken to a better hospital where his condition was upgraded to "alive." Your Spanish may be better than mine, but I'm reading this quote from him on a Peruvian news site as, "Thank God, I've returned to life." He remembers warming up before the match, then nothing, then waking up in the hospital with second-degree burns over a fifth of his body. His teammates already are calling him El Rayo, or "Lightning."

Doctors, EMTs and other well-meaning jerks will often tell you that you're lucky, which usually means you just had the least-lucky day of your year. Getting flash-fried on a soccer pitch does not qualify as luck under all but the grimmest, most Catholic definition. And yet! Pending some kind of cataclysmic organ damage, it beats the stuffing out of waking up dead. The league was not pleased that media ran word of the 21-year-old's death, but all things considered, sitting up a short time later and giving a shout-out to the almighty is not so bad. It's at least a half-fortunate man who gets to applaud his would-be assassin for poor marksmanship.

h/t Kolak Tom

Old-ass photo of lightning: Getty