It was always Pelé, or Ayrton Senna,” she said. The crowd ignored him after that.ĭidi Lima, a 29-year-old producer from Sao Paulo who often watched women’s soccer with her girlfriend, later spoke about the significance of the two Brazilian heroines. “But this is different, they are great,” he quickly corrected himself. The crowd of about 20 women and men looked at him in shock. He seemed to be the only one in the room holding that opinion. “I don’t really like watching women in sports,” said one older man in a working-class Rio bar watching Marta’s squad demolish Sweden. Soccer, or futebol, and judo have both often been seen as a sports best left to men. Over the last 100 years, Brazil has often elevated poor or black athletes, but they have rarely been women. She took on that abusive treatment after winning this week, saying “the monkey that needed to be in her cage is now an Olympic champion.” All week she has been a darling of Brazilian media, which usually puts white faces front and center, and has been accused of treating female athletes more as models than competitors. The move, Twitter users said, was tricky, thuggish behavior, and others called her a monkey and said she needed to be in a cage. When she was disqualified for an illegal move in London in 2012, Rafaela showed news cameras racist insults being hurled at her on Twitter. It was famously shown to the world in a film of the same name directed by Fernando Meirelles, who also put on the Rio 2016 opening ceremony. Rafaela grew up in a violent slum known as the “City of God” favela.
Marta, now widely considered the world’s best player, was born in a tiny town in the backlands of Brazil’s poor northeastern region. Rafaela and Marta grew up far from the elite circles that still mostly dominate Latin America’s largest country. Less than half of Brazilians identify as white. Michel Temer, her much more conservative vice president and interim successor, immediately replaced her entire cabinet with a new group entirely composed of white men.
Marta soccer player girlfriend trial#
She now faces an impeachment trial over allegations of budget irregularities. In May, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first woman president, was removed from office. Questions of gender, race and representation have resonated in Brazilian politics in recent months. Brazil’s tech-savvy population has flooded social networks with messages affirming women in sports, distributing memes that read “fight like a woman,” with pictures of Rafaela, or “Marta is better than Neymar!” In the days since Rafaela and Marta took center stage in Rio, they’ve moved to the center of a national conversation that has taken place largely online.
0 kommentar(er)
