The first ladies of brazilian olympic athletics, 1948–1984

Abstract

The article presents emerging themes from the trajectory of a research project on the history of the first Brazilian female athletes to compete in Olympic track and field events. The research culminated in the exhibition “The First Ladies of Brazilian Olympic Athletics, 1948–1984”, held at the end of 2024 at the Centro Cultural Correios in Rio de Janeiro, which attracted more than 17,000 visitors. The development of the exhibition’s content and its curatorial approach addressed how, over ten editions of the Olympic Games, from 1948 to 1984, women gradually gained the right to compete in the same track and field events as men — with the women’s marathon being authorized only in Los Angeles in 1984. The objective of the research — to reconstruct and narrate the stories of the sixteen athletes who composed Brazil’s women’s Olympic athletics teams throughout this long period — was to give faces to these athletes and their achievements, while also recovering their struggles as women. The project sought to inspire new generations of athletes and to contribute scientifically through the visual documentation of uniforms, symbols, press coverage, and the key figures of this untold history. Iconographic research in newspapers and other bibliographical sources revealed how the erasure of these athletes gradually occurred: although they were nominally mentioned, they were almost always replaced by photographs of male athletes, and in several cases, their stories came close to disappearing entirely. The article illustrates these findings by presenting the stories of six of these athletes — the first female team to represent Brazil in Olympic athletics — who competed at the London Games in 1948, against the backdrop of major milestones in the history of women’s athletics worldwide.