“If you knew my story, you never believe that I would become the greatest Olympic athletes from Brazil,” said Rebecca Andrade last week, 25 years old, the most adorned Olympian and the most successful Latin -American gymnast.
Sitting next to the legendary gymnast Nadia Kamanesei, she had a room full of journalists, delighted in Madrid, a day ahead of the Sports Laureus World Sports ceremony. Funny, charming and open to giving a long, detailed, deeply sensed answer to every question asked to her, Andrade is a dream of journalists.
She received the Laureus Award for the year for recovery not one, not two, but three ACL operations (all important ligaments passing through the knee) to win a number of medals at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, as well as the World Championships.
At the Olympics in Paris, she was in the center of what would become a defining moment of the game: when she stood on the podium with her gold for the floor, along with the American Simon Billes, the most decorated gymnast all time and Jordan Chilz, they turned to her, went down to her knees. Together, they formed the first in history a completely black podium in Olympic gymnastics.
“The historical moment is true,” Andrade said, the day before the Laureus reward. “It still gives me goose when I think about it. I’m not crying very much. I’m a happy, joyful man. Sometimes I smile so much my cheeks. But on this day I cried.”
The great breakthrough Andrade came to the Tokyo Olympics, where she became the first gymnast from South America to win the medal (silver in the worldwide category), and then a few days later led gold in the women’s repository.
In Paris, she raised her game: four medals, including re -silver and gold in the floor.
“I came from Favel. We were eight siblings, and they were raised by a mother -in -law who worked as a maid,” Andrade said last week. “But we never thought of our lives as cruelly. We lived with joy, and we dreamed and we believed in our dreams.”
Raised in the slums of Guarulhas, on the outskirts of San Paolo, Andrade came across gymnastics as a four-year-old; Her aunt got a job in the gymnasium and took her, by accident, on the day when attempts were carried out. The little girl participated and was admitted to the program funded by the government of young talents.
Her mother could not always afford to give her a bus, so Andrade sometimes walked for two hours each way, along the hilly roads to get to the training center. Her older brother, Emerson Andrade, would accompany her. When she trained, he collected cardboard and scrap metal from the area. So, he eventually saved to buy a bike, so he and Andrade would not have to go all the way.
As Rebecca’s talent, Andrade became apparent, the government, charity institutions, sports institutes, family and friends came to aid. “People around me, they were the ones who believed in me … my talent, who I was as a man, my potential. They believed in my dreams. I needed them. I needed all people around me to get results,” she says.
Listening to her, I thought about Dipari, 31 years old. Even after she went down in history with gold at the Asia Championship and became the first Indian gymnast to compete at the Olympics (Rio, 2016), nothing much has changed in her life. Just as nothing special changed for the 30 -year Pranati Nayak, an elite gymnast, which also qualified for the Olympics (Tokyo 2020).
In fact, nothing has changed in how gymnastics works in India.
The forage and the wrath, like Andrade, grew up with poverty and the whole load and the scenarios of incredible success. Unfortunately for them, their sport is played here, at home, the Federation of Gymnastics of India, so lined with cash and so constant that he demanded from the state federations to pay for living and food for his athletes at national championships. Why can’t our stories be more like Andrade?
(To achieve Rudraneil Sengupta with reviews, write rudraneil@gmail.com)
