Roberto Carlos: The Free Kick Physics Forgot

The ballboy on the left side of the France goal flinched and stepped back. The ball was heading toward him — or seemed to be, at the velocity it left Roberto Carlos's left foot — wide of the post by what appeared to be two or three feet, clearly destined for the stand. Then something happened. The ball, thirty-five metres from goal, travelling at over 130 kilometres per hour, bent. Not gradually, but sharply, as though it had remembered at the last moment where it was supposed to go.

The physics are real, not metaphorical. Roberto Carlos struck the ball with the outside of his left boot at sufficient pace that the Magnus effect — the curve induced by the ball's spin — did not take hold immediately. For the first twenty metres the ball flew almost straight. Then the spin overcame the inertia, and the ball curved, and it curved more sharply as the pace dropped, and Barthez — a goalkeeper who had seen everything — took one step sideways and watched the ball pass inside the post that the ball had seemed, two seconds earlier, to be travelling away from.

Barthez's reaction is part of the goal's mythology. He stands still for a moment, apparently unable to process what his eyes have reported. Then his shoulders drop, and he turns, and the expression on his face is not frustration but something closer to philosophical resignation — the expression of a man who has accepted that some things are simply outside the available range of human response.

Roberto Carlos scored the goal eleven months before the 1998 World Cup, in a pre-tournament friendly. It was not a decisive goal, not a last-minute winner, not part of a championship narrative. It simply happened, in Lyon, in June, as a demonstration that a left-back from Garça in São Paulo state was capable of producing something that made professional goalkeepers feel that their entire career had been preparation for the wrong thing.