Deaf Cat Achilles Claims to Predict World Cup Champions—See the Forecast

This year’s World Cup is upon us, and while teams are warming up, a deaf cat named Achilles already knows the outcome.

Achilles the white cat is deaf and lives in St. Petersburg, Russia’s Hermitage Museum. Oh, and he’s also a bit of a cat clairvoyant, if you will. So much so that he’s been named as the psychic who can predict the winners and losers of the World Cup in Russia, which is just a week away.

Makes sense–they say cats have nine lives. Surely their crazy cat sense comes in handy in one of them. And, considering he’s well above the last World Cup animal psychic Paul the Octopus on the evolutionary chain, what could go wrong? A lot, maybe, as Paul was dead on picking the outcomes of  2008 European games and the 2010 World Cup –there are some big paws (tentacles?) to fill.

According to veterinarian Anna Kondratieva, big paws aren’t a problem as Achilles has even been preparing for the World Cup by slimming down a bit. She says people tend to feed him more than they should, and that he’s on a strict diet so he looks more like a cat and less of like a football, which is what she said he looked like upon first meeting.

Achilles is one of several cats who lived at the Hermitage Museum, which was once the Imperial Winter Palace. He’s the only one who accurately predicted the outcomes of the 2017 Confederations Cup, though, and since he’s deaf, he can focus on the teams and their food when it comes to making predictions–no distractions from the paparazzi around.

You read that right–the food. Achilles will make his predictions by choosing between different bowls of food that bear each team’s flag. To prepare, he’s dressed in a red jersey and reviews the teams and their game schedules before his meals and (and then the exercise wheel, much to his dismay).