SPORTS-BRAZIL: Playing for a Living

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

By Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 15 2004 (IPS) - ”For me it was like being reborn. I owe everything I have to basketball,” says 38-year-old Brazilian Cintia Girelli Ribeiro, who was left paraplegic by a car accident in 1987.

Basketball ”was my rehabilitation. It allowed me to gain independence and make new friends, and opened doors for me, even in the field of employment.”

Ribeiro began to play basketball ten years ago as part of her physiotherapy. But she turned out to be so good that in 1996 she made it onto the Brazilian team that won medals at the Paraolympic games in Atlanta.

”It opened up a new world for me, and I met a lot of people,” which buried the idea that ”I couldn’t do anything anymore” after the tragic accident, she told IPS.

Today she works as a secretary in the Lar San Francisco de Paula Foundation, an institution that provides assistance to disabled people in Rio de Janeiro.

Ribeiro now plans to study industrial design at the university, and will have to give up basketball, because she won’t be able to make the training three nights a week.

Brazil has many wheelchair-bound basketball players, who compete in state, regional and national championships.

There are 18 men’s teams in Sao Paulo, the biggest city, and six in Rio de Janeiro, the second-largest city, said Ribeiro. But there are only eight teams for disabled women in the entire country, she added.

Basketball for paraplegics is just one aspect of the 20th century boom in sports in Brazil, described by the Atlas of Sports, Physical Education, and Physical Activities in Health and Recreation, which is being drawn up by a consortium of six national institutions, and will be published in February.

More than two-thirds of the country’s 234,000 physical education teachers have graduated from Brazil’s physical education schools and university departments, which mushroomed from five in 1940 to 406 in 2003.

Physical education continued to expand despite the stagnation suffered by the economy in the past two decades. While Brazil’s Gross Domestic Product grew just 2.25 percent a year between 1996 and 2000, for example, GDP in the sports industry climbed 12.34 percent a year.

Today, the 12 main athletic disciplines provide jobs for 963,000 people, including paid athletes, coaches, trainers, janitors, administrative staff and others, in a country where unemployment reaches almost 13 percent.

The list of sports that generate the greatest number of jobs is headed by football, which employs 150,000 people, followed by gymnastics, wrestling and martial arts schools and academies, which employ 140,000 people, and equestrian sports, which provide employment for 133,000 people, according to the statistics compiled by the 356 people who took part in producing the Atlas.

Brazil is no longer ”a football country,” but has become a nation characterised by a variety of sports in the past three decades, which has had a strong economic and social impact, said Lamartine da Costa, who came up with the idea for the Atlas and coordinated the project.

Official figures show that some 7.5 million of Brazil’s 177 million people play football, 11 million swim in the country’s 1.3 million pools, and 10.5 million play indoor football.

Brazil has 20,000 gymnastics, wrestling and martial arts schools and academies, more than the U.S. total of 18,200. However, that comparison is misleading, because a total of 3.4 million Brazilians visit the academies, compared to 33.2 million people in the United States, according to the Atlas.

Some of the figures to be published in the Atlas could be overly conservative, said Rui Campos, a former professional volleyball player who formed part of the national team in the 1980s, and played in Italy, Portugal and France from 1988 to 1993.

Today Campos is the director of sports in the Industrial Social Service (SESI) organisation. Some 500,000 workers participate in SESI’s sports progr amme, which takes part in national and international tournaments.

One large company in the southern state of Paraná, for instance, organises games between 70 teams of employees, sending a team made up of the best players to the SESI championships, said Campos.

That would seem to indicate that the number of workers involved in team sports in their companies amounts to much more than half a million, he said in an interview with IPS.

New athletic disciplines and fads are also constantly emerging, such as kite surf, although since many of them are still largely ignored by the media, there is little public awareness. That is also the case of the traditional sports and games of indigenous people, and children’s games that become full-fledged sports, with major tournaments, like skateboarding, said Campos.

Campos complained that in its thirst for ”hot” news items like accidents and tragedies, the press forgets about the varied world of sports, which has a positive impact on society.

Sports boost quality of life, say the companies involved in SESI’s sports programme, and contribute to keeping children in school, bolster academic performance, and strengthen cultural development.

But sports can also bring frustration and heartbreak for millions of youngsters keen on becoming professional players in disciplines that regularly produce millionaires.

That is the case of Felipe Borges Dutton, who at the age of 12 was admitted to the football school run by Zico Coimbra, one of the top Brazilian footballers in the 1970s and 1980s who today coaches the national team in Japan, where he played a key role in bolstering the popularity of the sport.

Borges Dutton showed promise as a young centre-half in the Zico Football Club (CFZ), whose professional team was seeking to make it into the first division in the Rio de Janeiro championship. But a bohemian lifestyle tripped up his career when he began to frequent nightclubs and miss the daily training sessions, he told IPS.

He thus lost the chance to make it to the professional leagues in CFZ. After that he tried two other clubs, and finally gave up. His dream was buried forever after his foot was injured in a car accident.

Today Borges Dutton is studying business administration. ”I wanted to be a player on a team like Flamengo,” the most popular club in Brazil, but ”it’s hard to give up your fun” in adolescence, he admitted. (END/IPS/LA/CR-LB-IF/TRA-SO SW/MO/DM/04)