All eyes are on Neymar
Golden hopes in Brazil rest with soccer superstar
Last week, police were called to the hotel just outside Rio where the Brazilian soccer team was staying. There, they arrested a 21-year-old student who had managed to infiltrate the compound using fake accreditation and was hiding in the laundry room waiting for the opportune moment to strike. What the intruder wanted, naturally enough, was a selfie with Neymar.
But then, everyone wants a piece of Neymar these days. Even at an event where soccer is a largely peripheral sport and in which most of its biggest stars have stayed away, Neymar’s face is still everywhere: in shop windows, on billboards, beaming from the sides of buses.
Soccer has been played at the Olympics for almost a century, but never before has a tournament been dominated by the spectre of one man. To put this into perspective, the second-biggest star in the men’s event is probably Nigeria’s John Obi Mikel. To all intents and purposes, this is the Neymar show. And in a country still begrudgingly obsessed with soccer, he remains the country’s biggest sporting draw by some distance.
The Barcelona forward is thus laden not just with the captain’s armband, but the existential angst of a nation that has never won a men’s Olympic gold medal in its flagship sport.
The nation’s relationship with Neymar is not entirely reverential. This is 2016, after all, and this is Brazil. Two years have passed since a humiliating 7-1 defeat by Germany in the World Cup semifinals, a period that has been accompanied by unprecedented economic recession, all-too-familiar social unrest and yet more failure on the soccer pitch with Brazil failing to get past the group stage at this summer’s Copa America Centenario. Brazil is a country that has stopped believing in heroes.
And Neymar, even though he missed that defeat with a back injury that brought the nation to the brink of devotional psychosis, has not been immune. Even though he has made it his personal mission to deliver an elusive gold medal on home soil, even though he missed the Copa America Centenario in order to be in peak condition, his popularity comes with certain caveats. The tax evasion case and the partying to dawn with Justin Bieber will naturally be forgiven if Neymar can inspire Brazil to the gold medal.