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00:00Only five players in history know what it is to win at least three times the Ballon d'Or.
00:06The last one who did it before Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo started their golden age was him.
00:13Marco Van Basten.
00:15Nicknamed the Utrecht swan for his elegance, Van Basten won the first of his three Ballons d'Or in 1988.
00:22Only five years later he would play his last game, at just 28 years old.
00:27His recurrent ankle injuries made him live a hell of operations, infiltrations and unbearable pain.
00:34In those five years, he became one of the best strikers of all time.
00:40As a reminder, there is what he did with the Dutch national team in the 1988 European Cup and that earned him his first Ballon d'Or.
00:48It was barely his first national team tournament and without being a starter in the first game,
00:53he ended up being the great hero of the first title of La Naranja Mecánica.
00:57Hat-trick against England, winning goal against Germany in the semifinals,
01:01and this work of art in the final against the Soviet Union.
01:05He is still one of the best goals in the history of football.
01:09At the club level, he exploded in the Eredivisie with the Ajax hand,
01:12and then he made the leap to Milan with which he won three Serie A,
01:16but above all he touched the sky with two European Cups in a row.
01:21They were his best years, but neither the injuries nor the pain in his right ankle abandoned him.
01:27In 1993, his ankle said enough.
01:30After several operations that did not result, Marco Van Basten said goodbye to football on August 18, 1995.
01:39Of course, he became a legend.
01:51For more UN videos visit www.un.org