“If you knew my story, you would never believe that I would become the greatest Olympic athlete from Brazil,” Rebeca Andrade, 25, Brazil’s most decorated Olympian and the most successful Latin American gymnast of all time, said last week.

Seated next to legendary gymnast Nadia Comaneci, she had a room full of journalists enthralled in Madrid, a day ahead of the Laureus World Sports Awards ceremony. Funny, charming and open to giving long, detailed, deeply felt answers to every question asked of her, Andrade is a journalist’s dream come true.

She won the Laureus Comeback of the Year award for recovering from not one, not two, but three ACL surgeries (the all-important ligament that runs across the knee joint) to win a spate of medals at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, and the world championships in-between.

At the Paris Olympics, she was at the centre of what would become a defining moment of the Games: as she stood on the podium with her gold for the floor event, alongside the US’s Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast of all time, and Jordan Chiles, they turned to her, went down on their knees and bowed. Together, they had formed the first-ever all-black podium in Olympic gymnastics.

“A truly historic moment,” Andrade said, the day before the Laureus awards. “It still gives me the goosebumps when I think about it. I am not one to cry a lot. I’m a happy, joyful person. Sometimes I smile so much that my cheeks hurt. But that day I cried.”

Andrade’s big breakthrough came at the Tokyo Olympics, where she became the first gymnast from South America to win a medal (a silver in the all-around category), then topped that with a gold in the women’s vault a few days later.

In Paris, she upped her game: four medals, including a repeat of the all-around silver, and the gold in the floor event.

“I came from a favela. We were eight brothers and sisters, being brought up by a single mother who worked as a maid,” Andrade said last week. “But we never thought of our life as hard. We lived with joy, and we dreamt, and we believed in our dreams.”

Raised in the slums of Guarulhos, on the outskirts of Sao Paolo, Andrade stumbled into gymnastics as a four-year-old; her aunt got a job as a cleaner at a gymnasium, and took her along, coincidentally, on a day when tryouts were being held. The little girl participated, and was admitted to a government-funded programme for young talent.

Her mother couldn’t always afford to give her bus fare, so Andrade sometimes walked two hours each way, along hilly roads, to get to her training centre. Her elder brother, Emerson Andrade, would accompany her. As she trained, he collected cardboard and scrap metal from the area, to sell. In this way, he eventually saved enough to buy a bicycle, so he and Andrade wouldn’t have to walk all the way.

As Rebeca Andrade’s talent became apparent, the government, charitable institutions, sports institutes, family and friends, stepped in to help. “The people around me, they were the ones who believed in me… my talent, who I was as a person, my potential. They believed in my dreams. I needed them. I needed all those people around me to get the results,” she says.

Listening to her, I thought of Dipa Karmakar, 31. Even after she made history with a gold at the Asian Championships and became the first Indian gymnast to compete at the Olympics (Rio, 2016), nothing much changed in her life. Just as nothing much changed for Pranati Nayak, 30, an elite gymnast who also qualified for an Olympics (Tokyo 2020).

Nothing much has changed, in fact, in the way gymnastics is run in India.

Karmakar and Nayak, like Andrade, grew up fighting poverty and all its burdens, and scripted improbable success. Sadly for them, their sport is run, here at home, by a Gymnastics Federation of India so cash-strapped and so clueless that it demanded state federations pay for accommodation and food for their athletes, at the national championships. Why can’t our stories be more like Andrade’s?

(To reach Rudraneil Sengupta with feedback, email rudraneil@gmail.com)

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