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August 22, 2008
Nervous Norteamericanos in Brasil
Posted by: Chris
These are tense times for us "Norteamericanos" in Brazil, as Americans are often referred to here. Brasileiros are huge sports fans -- imagine Philadelphia or Boston multiplied by a country of 200 million -- and intensely patriotic about their national teams. Forget "U!S!A!" chants. You haven't heard anything until you watch TV here and hear the pre-recorded, echoed shriek "Bra-ZIL! ZIL! ZIL!" after every decent play or performance.
Of course their passion for "futebol" (pronounced something like "footy-ball") is unmatched worldwide. So you can imagine how their blood was boiling when the men's soccer team was ousted in the Olympic semifinal by hated arch-rivals Argentina. The sarcastic headline in Globo said it all: "Now, the women's team is all that's left."
The U.S. women took care of that, defeating Brazil in the gold medal match in overtime, just as they had in the Athens Olympics, even though the Brazilian women had completely dominated the game.
Volleyball is Brazil's other great sports passion, with loyal fan support for professional leagues for both men and women. For obvious reasonsbBeach volleyball is also hugely popular here, which explains why two of the three men's teams on the medal stand in Beijing were Brazilian. But it was a pair of Americans looking down from the golden perch on the Brazilians in silver and bronze position.
Now the Olympic tournaments for team volleyball have finally reached their climax, and the gold medal matches are set for men and women. It will be the U.S. vs. Brazil. In both.
There will be some nervous gringos in Brazil this next couple of days . . .
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Comments
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Those Brazilian girls really got it goin' on.
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Chris:
Did you catch on Globo, during the medal ceremony for women's volleyball yesterday, when the American team marched in the commentator guy said "the Americans are smiling because they acknowledge the superiority of the Brazilian team"? I fell off the couch laughing...
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Kevin on Aug 22, 2008 4:36:14 PM:
LOL tell me about it, Chris! I had to go incognito to the grocery store yesterday after the US women's team beat Brazil in soccer. Both of us are so obviously gringoes - kinda hard to not stand out on the street at times like that. But the Brazilians don't hate Americans at the end of the day, so they get over things like this fairly quickly (and we never threaten them at World Cup time). But they loathe the Argentines in every way, so I doubt they'll ever get over that men's football loss. Even I was pissed about that rsrs. (Now that the US men's basketball team has humiliated the Argentines, maybe we won some points.)
I think the other this is that this has been a really bad year for the Brazilians all around. So many of their star athletes have come close to medals and then choked in the final crucial moments. Diego Hypolito's fall during his floor exercise in gymnastics was symbolic of this problem.
And you're right about the sports commentators on TV here. While American commentators are obviously rooting for the US team in their hearts, they still know that the American audience loves underdogs, and loves a little drama, so they will champion stars from other countries and show a level of sportsmanship when Americans lose. But on Brazilian TV, they are so raucously pro-Brazil that they scream advice to the players and coaches when things are going wrong and seem to lose their minds when the team scores. When the Americans beat Brazil at women's soccer, there was no more than maybe 5 seconds of footage of the victorious US women, matched against long, painful shots of the sobbing Brazilian losers and their devastated fans in the stands. And then there was the 45 seconds of split screen of Brazilian star player Marta Vieira da Silva, sobbing in the arms of the team coach, and Marta's blubbering mother back in Brazil watching the game from her working class home, who looked like one of those women in Baghdad after a bombing or something, crying and pulling at her hair in emotional agony.