Knowing that sports drive social change is ingrained in every Brazilian’s DNA. This becomes even clearer when looking at those who fight for new life achievements inside and outside the ring. According to the Brazilian Boxing Confederation (CBBoxe), boxing has become the country’s most successful sport in the Olympic Games since the 2012 London Olympics.
Discussing boxing and its social aspect is part of the daily lives of people like former Brazilian boxer Breno Macedo and his family from Rio Claro, in São Paulo state. Following his father Marcos Macedo’s footsteps, Breno opened a popular boxing gym, Boxe Autônomo, and leads the social project MMBoxe.
The gym was established in late 2015 in the Leila Khaled Occupation in downtown São Paulo and is now located in Casa do Povo in the city’s Bom Retiro neighborhood. With affordable monthly fees, the gym provides a space for sports recreation for kids and teenagers and intensive training for those who want to pursue boxing as a career.
In the early years of boxing in Brazil, most participants were immigrants seeking social inclusion. Éder Jofre, the greatest boxer in Brazilian history, exemplifies this as the son of an Italian mother and an Argentinian father who came to Brazil seeking better living conditions.
Today, the sport’s social profile has changed. More black, indigenous, or multi-racial people and women now represent the demographic mosaic of the sport, despite prevailing prejudices and sexism.
The 2012 London Olympics marked a significant starting point for women’s inclusion in boxing, as they had been prohibited from practicing the sport for decades. It was only in 2001 that women’s boxing held its first world championship at the European Cup. The prominence of women athletes in the ring is gradually silencing the sexism that was once visibly supported and propagated in Brazil.
Mr. Macedo’s studies and experience have revealed that boxing is present in all low-income communities in Brazil. Former boxer Adriana Araújo clearly illustrates this statement. Coming from a very poor family in Salvador, Bahia, Ms. Araújo could not choose sports as her sole occupation as it did not provide enough money to survive. After years of selling raffle tickets and coffee at gyms and working as a healthcare assistant, Ms. Araújo received the Bolsa Atleta in 2009, a federal program providing financial support to athletes in Olympic sports.
From then on, she became the first Brazilian woman boxer to win an Olympic medal in the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, representing a generation of female athletes trying to find their voices through the sport.
Breno Macedo now works as a sports and life coach in Rio Claro. He obtained a master’s degree in the social history of boxing, and he seeks to provide not only physical training for new talents but also social, cultural, and intellectual support. He stimulates debates and reading circles at the gym to address a pertinent issue that usually plagues the life of boxers from poor backgrounds: prejudice.
One of the fruits of the social project led by Mr. Macedo is featherweight Jucielen Romeu, a vivid representation of a black female athlete who knows where she comes from and where she intends to go, making her a promising contender for Paris 2024.
Her gold medal victory at the 2023 Pan-American Games had repercussions beyond the podium. Along with Beatriz Ferreira, Romeu is Brazil’s great hope for boxing gold in the coming weeks.
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