WILL BRAZIL’S EMBRACE LAST?
Women’s soccer team rises on national radar
This botequim, RIO DE JANEIRO as corner bars are called, in the shadow of Rio’s Maracana Stadium is as quintessentially Rio as Sugarloaf Mountain and Ipanema Beach. Friends gather late into the evening over tall, dewy glasses of draft beer while a couple digs into a plate of ribs and the evening soap opera concludes on the TVs around them.
Eduardo Tacto, a coach as enthusiastic as he is hard-nosed about women’s soccer, sits down with two of his athletes to watch what for Brazilians has flashed as a source of national pride in the Summer Olympics: their women’s national team.
The first week of the Games has been a good one for Brazilian female athletes.
The first gold medal for Brazil went to judoka Rafaela Silva, a young navy sergeant from the City of God favela. The next day, Brazilian rugby player Isadora Cerullo received a marriage proposal from her girlfriend on the field. Marta, arguably Brazil’s most accomplished athlete who won the FIFA World Player of the Year award five times in a row, scored two goals in a 5-1 victory against Sweden on Saturday.
At the same time, Brazil’s men’s soccer team had scoreless draws against South Africa and Iraq before beating Denmark 4-0 late Wednesday to advance to the elimination stage.
Glee over the comparison en- sued on social media, with the hashtag #Sai-Neymar-Entra-Marta (#Out-With-Neymar-In-With-Marta) trending in the country.
Brazilians shared memes such as forward Neymar’s face pasted over Miss Colombia, who last year was accidentally crowned Miss Universe before the pageant’s presenter corrected himself and had the tiara put on Miss Philippines (who in the meme was, of course, a smiling Marta).
Popular political scientist and commentator Mauricio Santoro tweeted: “My current utopia for Brazil: a country in which all of our institutions function as well as our women’s team.”
As the women’s team filed into the Nova Amazonia stadium for a Tuesday night match against South Africa, Dandara da Silva, 20, an ambitious amateur indoor soccer midfielder, muttered the name of each player as she came on to the field: Aline, Erika, Raquel. She asks the bar owner to turn up the volume.
The stylish high schooler with a nose ring and cropped haircut slumps over the table with her eyes trained toward the screen alongside teammate Tamyres Placias, 27. Their team, Criciuma, competes each weekend in Rio and has become a crusader on the local circuit of women’s tournaments, where many teams form and dissolve quickly over lack of cohesion and support.
Tacto started coaching women’s soccer a decade ago when he frequented local pickup games along the beach and thought the women played well against him.
“Imagine one day if we earned something playing in a club like the boys. You know Neymar gets millions and millions and Marta just sweats it,” Placias says to Silva after they each grimace when goalkeeper Aline Reis wipes out and takes a kick on the ground.
The Olympics are bringing women’s sports to spectators who otherwise would rarely watch them in the host nation. “Many people here in Rio are only now discovering that women’s soccer exists because it’s not shown on non-cable TV,” Tacto says of the Olympic effect.
But he’s pessimistic that this moment of Olympic pride in female players will make a difference. In fact, he sees the attention around Marta as still being about a male athlete — Neymar, whom Brazilians have no shortage of disdain for right now. His coach suggested that the star forward might walk off the team if Brazilians keep booing him.
Tacto says he sees Brazilian’s shouts to “call in Marta” when Neymar performs poorly not as an appreciation for her career but instead as a provocation to the latter.
Asked if the packed stadium at the Amazonian arena made her hopeful about her own future to play professionally, Silva had no illusions.
“Not for me, but for the women who are coming out now,” she says. Tacto exasperatedly points to the six commentators, all male, discussing the game on the Globo broadcast. “This reproduces the thinking that only men play soccer,” he said.
Even as he continues to pour his own time and money into the amateur team — neighborhood men’s team are often able to get local sponsors, whereas his female players often pool their money to pay the $60 tournament entrance fees — Tacto is equal parts dedication and dejection.
“Brazil’s men’s team could be eliminated tomorrow and the women get the gold,” he says, “and it wouldn’t change a thing.”
Tuesday’s match ended in a tie, and Silva left the bar wondering how much longer fans would remember Marta and the women’s soccer team if they don’t win their next game. The team next plays Australia on Friday in a quarterfinal match.