The number of people killed when the aircraft carrying the Zambia national football team came down off Libreville on 27 April 1993. Twenty five passengers and five crew.
The team that was lost
The side assembled in the early nineties was built on the generation that had beaten Italy four nil at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, a result that is still one of the largest defeats an Italian national team has suffered.
They were on their way to Dakar for a qualifier for the 1994 World Cup. The aircraft, a de Havilland Canada Buffalo of the Zambian Air Force, refuelled in Libreville and crashed into the Atlantic shortly after taking off again.
There were no survivors.
What was left
Zambia had lost most of a national team in a single night. A handful of players who had travelled separately, or who were not in the squad, remained.
The federation rebuilt around them, calling up players from the domestic league and from clubs abroad.
Ten months later
The 1994 Africa Cup of Nations was held in Tunisia. Zambia, with a squad assembled in under a year, reached the final.
They lost it to Nigeria, two goals to one.
Libreville again
Zambia won the Africa Cup of Nations for the first time in 2012. The final was played in Libreville, the city they had taken off from nineteen years earlier, a short distance from where the aircraft went down.
The squad visited the site before the match.
Why the number is the loss
Most prints in this collection carry a score or a margin. This one carries the number of people who died, because the achievement that follows it cannot be read without it: a final reached by a team that had to be built from nothing.