The inside of Rafaela Silva’s right biceps is tattooed with the Olympic rings and a note, in Portuguese: “God knows how much I’ve suffered and what I’ve done to get here.” Credit Leslye Davis/The New York Times
“The opponent was a girl from Hungary who I had beaten easily before,” Silva said. “I don’t know if I thought that I should just do this quickly, but the judge gave me one point, then changed it and disqualified me.”
The loss still burns.
“I trained four years for the Olympics, and now in a minute they were gone,” she said.
The immediate aftermath was worse. Some Brazilians on social media mocked her and called her racial epithets, one saying that “the place of a monkey is in a cage.” Silva could not resist responding, and did so with vitriolic name-calling of her own. The Twitter war attracted so much attention that the Brazil Olympic Committee stepped in to admonish the attacks, and judo officials persuaded Silva to stop replying to bigoted critics.
Nearly four years later, she does not regret her actions.
“Not at all,” she said.
Heartbreak in London
The episode nearly made her quit. She had overcome many obstacles to become one of the world’s best, but the closest she came to quitting was after the London Games, Bernardes said.
“She never showed that she would give up on the sport until 2012, when she was disqualified at the Olympics,” he said. “There were a lot of racist comments on social media. Nasty ones. And she answered some of them, fighting in social media, and got really angry. Then she got scared of going out on the streets and being harassed. I was afraid she would give up on the sport.”
Silva took a few months off. Her family worried for her.
“Rafaela got depressed,” Raquel Silva said. “She watched television all day and cried alone in front of the TV. Our mother cooked her favorite things to cheer her up, but that didn’t work.”
Bernardes wanted Rafaela Silva to come to the institute, to resume training and rebuild the fire. When she finally came, she happened upon a presentation by a sports psychologist. Intrigued and inspired, Silva resumed her physical training and added mental training, too. The next spring, her focus back and her frustration funneled, she became world champion.
And now the Olympics have come again, this time to her, just a few miles from home. Bernardes will coach her at the institute. Her sister, a weight class below, will spar with her. Her parents are hoping to get tickets to her matches. A nation will watch, expecting a result to celebrate.
And a neighborhood will cheer her on, to see if a young woman from the crumbling, chaotic streets in the hills can construct one of the unlikeliest Olympic stories for the home team.
Helena Rebello contributed reporting.
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