How a yellow jersey is dividing Brazil
BRASILIA (Reuters) – If the sport suffers from a lack of high performance athletes, it must find inspiration in the Brazilian Olympic history of the 1970s and 1980s that, when athletes competed in the lead-up to the 2016 Olympics in Rio, they didn’t just have to win: They had to win on a global scale.
From the very first gold medal won by the sprinter Hernani Barra at the South American championship in Havana in 1971 to the first ever gold medal won by the water polo player Lenny Krayzelburg in Atlanta four years later, Brazil was the birthplace of a new and extremely powerful movement in sport: The Yellow Jersey.
There’s no better place to try applying the values of that era to Rio – as host nation or as the Olympics – than in the team for which the sport’s biggest name, world champion Oscar Freire, will be serving as captain for the Games. The 2014 world champion will lead Team Jamaica, a team built on the values of the 1970s.
Freire became the first swimmer to win Olympic gold at the 2016 Games back in 2008, when as an eight-year-old he won the 400-metre freestyle at the Beijing Games with a blistering time of 4 minute 57.01 seconds.
Freire, who was part of the gold-medal-winning U.S. swimming team in 2008, was a member of the Jamaica team at the 2012 London Olympics. He went on to win gold in the men’s 200m backstroke at an event won by his brother, Usain Bolt, the current world record holder in the 100 metres and Jamaica’s first Olympic gold medal in the sport.
But as Freire takes the reins as captain of the Team Jamaica after a sterling first season and two medals in London, he’ll be taking on a different pressure in Rio.
The team will be competing in three sports – swimming, bobsled and athletics – which aren’t regarded as Olympic sports, but are Olympic sports with huge global followings.
“When it happened, I felt like gold for (Freire), my brother and Jamaica,” Bolt said. “And then I feel like gold again. I am proud of him, and I know he is proud of me, too.”
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