Brazil learns to love the oval ball
The other football game finds a captive audience in the favelas
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — The boy can be no more than five years old. Wearing a vastly outsized fluorescent bib that swamps him, giving him the appearance of an altar boy in a flowing cassock, he has in his hands a rugby ball. And it is clear from his expression that he has never seen anything like it.
His first instinct is to bounce the strangely shaped object at his feet. When it bucks and jumps, spinning away across the dusty ground, he chases after it, giggling.
Within 20 minutes, he is joining in a game of touch rugby, flinging the ball around and catching it with aplomb, a broad grin playing across his face.
This is not a scene from Twickenham, home of England Rugby. This is happening high in the hills above Rio de Janeiro, in the Complexo Do Lins favela, a place where majestic scenery meets grinding poverty, where average family incomes are barely a dollar a day.
Here, in the very heartland of soccer, the place where seemingly every 10-year-old has the skills to bamboozle any English adult foolish enough to take them on, Premiership Rugby and the British Council are introducing the oval-ball game.
To coincide with Rugby Sevens making its Olympic debut in the city next summer, they dispatched 15 coaches to Brazil two years ago as part of the Try Rugby initiative, to evangelize the sport, to sell it in the country where soccer is king.
“They love it,” says Dom Caton, a former Exeter Chiefs community coach who is bringing the game into the favela.
“They pick it up incredibly quickly. They’ve got such physical literacy; their running and footwork is amazing to see.”
This is an unpacified favela, one where criminal gangs still hold sway.
And Caton and his team of volunteer, largely expat coaches have been escorted by a cohort of heavily armed police to the dust-bowl pitch where they are conducting their session.
Although it is no more than a couple of miles from Rio’s glorious beachfront, most of the children throwing the ball around have never left this favela in their brief lives. The only way to introduce them to the sport is to take it to them.
“We host taster sessions on the beach here every week,” Wayne Morris, Premiership Rugby’s director of community, says. “But for these kids, that might as well be on Mars.”
Try Rugby has been running in Sao Paulo for two years. More than 14,000 play every week there — 38 per cent of them female — which has doubled the rugby-playing base in Brazil. The hope is the move into Rio will double that number again.
“This sport is not going to come to an end in this country in 2016,” Morris says. “That is just the beginning.”
Brazil will enter teams in both the men’s and women’s sevens competition next summer. The men are unlikely to be anything other than cannon fodder. But the women, 10 times South American champions, could make a huge impression on the country if they come close to the podium.
Most of the children in the favela aren’t even aware rugby is in the Games, but there is a real sense that this sport could catch on.