From the Cradle to Athens: The Silver-Coated Story of a Warrior in Brazilian Soccer

Juliana Ribeiro Cabral was captain of the Brazilian women”s soccer team that won the silver medal at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. Biographical methodology is used in this article, which is an oral history of an elite athlete”s life using semi-structured interviews to capture her personal reflections. Fighting against gender prejudice, Cabral made the Brazilian national team when she was fifteen years old. Three years later she was a member of the Brazilian team at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Four years after that, at the Athens Olympics, she was captain, leading a team that demonstrated to the world that soccer in Brazil is not only a man”s game and that Brazilian women also can play successful football at the international level. Cabral”s story, and her personal reflections, reveal the paradoxes in which Brazil”s female soccer players are enmeshed: on the one hand, they fight against their subjugation in the field; on the other hand, they display intolerance against non-normative ways of being feminine.