Early days of Brazil Paralympics marked by stopgaps and lack of support

Brazil's first Paralympic medal was won by chance, in 1976. Athletes Robson Sampaio and Luiz Carlos da Costa had traveled to Toronto, Canada, to join the wheelchair basketball team, but ended up developing an interest in a sport called lawn bowls, a type of bowling not widely played in Brazil. They learned the rules of the sport then and there and came back home crowned silver champions.

Stopgaps were not uncommon in Paralympic sport after it was introduced in Brazil, says Michelle Barreto, a PhD in Adaptive Physical Education. At the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Paralympic sport in Brazil from 1976 to 1992.

“Since there weren't a lot o people involved in the early days, they used to play a number of disciplines, which is made clear by the fact that they didn't use to win a lot of medals, as they weren't so good at anything in particular. It was participation that was awarded. That's exactly what happened with the first medal,” she recounts.

The lack of acknowledgment of athletes and Paralympic sports was also major problem in the period. According to the scholar, Paralympians complain that they were not appreciated the way athletes are today, regardless of their performance. “They say with pride: 'Wow, I won a Paralympic medal, I represented my country, but the next week I was forgotten.' The press wasn't the way it is today,” Barreto says.

“I used to come back with medals, and arriving at the airport was normal, no one would recognize me,” said former sprinter Ádria Santos, who took part in six Paralympic Games from 1988 to 2008 and bagged 13 medals. She argues the sport as underpublicized. “Only after we won a high number of medals were we given a chance to appear on open television,” she says.

Visibility, she says, started to raise in the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney, which received more media coverage.

The first president of the Brazilian Paralympic Committee, João Batista Carvalho e Silva, also mentions ignorance and lack of interest from society in Paralympic sports. According to him, in 2004, when swimmer Clodoaldo Silva collected six gold medals, the visibility of Paralympic athletes began to change for the better.

Clodoaldo Silva himself says that the Paralympics in Athens were a “watershed moment” for the acknowledgment of adaptive sports. “For the first time, the Paralympics began to be broadcast to the world and to Brazil. And the Brazilian society began to see that Paralympics were the same as Olympics. They saw there was no difference,” said the multiple medalist in an interview to Agência Brasil. He also highlighted the improvements in accessibility and infrastructure.

"In 1998, when I started to swim, we had no adapted buses. We had no incentive laws for Paralympic sport. And today we have it all, these were big gains for the individual with disabilities and also for Paralympic sport, which gained respectability with its victories and achievements,” Silva argued.

The Rio 2016 Paralympics will be held from 7-18 September.

*Daniel Mello contributed to this article.

Translated by Fabrício Ferreira / Amarílis Anchieta