Monique de Souza Sant’Anna Fogliatto
PhD candidate at the São Paulo State University – Bauru Campus. Her research seeks to understand the representations of the Brazilian skater Rayssa Leal in the media, considering her coming of age in front of the cameras and the gender stigmas of skating.
Email: moniquefogliatto@gmail.com.
At the end of another Olympic Games, skateboarding’s media success is evident. The International Olympic Committee’s clear bet on values such as radicalism and youth – the arguments for the inclusion of five new modalities in Tokyo – has proven right by audience ratings and important historical landmarks achieved. The youngest podium in the history of the event, which included two Japanese athletes, also had Rayssa Leal, who, in addition to the silver medal, became the Brazilian Olympic Committee’s youngest medalist in 2021.
Over the course of the shortened Olympic cycle, we have seen the age and professional growth of Rayssa Leal, who was introduced to the public in 2015, nicknamed “Fairy”, reached after a popularization of the video where she made tricks with a fairy costume in her homeland, Imperatriz – an inland town in the Northern region of Brazil. The transition from childhood to adolescence was also marked by important achievements, demonstrating her high technical level: two consecutive titles in the sport’s biggest competition, Street League Skateboarding (SLS), a double championship at the X Games, considered the Olympic Games of extreme sports, and the admission in the select “Nine Club” – a group that brings together the athletes with the highest scores in the skate’s competitions – an achievement unprecedented feat in a women’s competition, at Super Crown SLS 2023, held in São Paulo, Brazil.
The landmarks reached during this Olympic cycle made her a favorite for gold at the 2024 edition, in Paris. The chosen backdrop for the skate competitions was the Place de la Concorde, an emblematic site for French’s history. This time, the battles, and victories, would be sporting, with Rayssa facing her biggest opponents, the Japaneses and herself, with all the questions about growing in front of the cameras. Three years after Tokyo, new challenges have been set.
Favoritism, however, gave place to uncertainty. The smile, relaxation, dances and lightness, evident in the 13-year-old girl in Tokyo, was replaced by the responsibility of representing again her country, in the first Olympics that the fans could watch in loco since the end of the pandemic. Rayssa Leal had to fight, internally and with her opponents, in a competition in which the technical level of the tricks and the athlete’s performance put her place on the Olympic podium at risk.
She needed to add a 45-second lap without a fall, and of a high technical level, with two other well-scored maneuvers to keep the chance of the title alive. But it wasn’t going to be easy. Already in the qualifying round, the first challenge: competing in the third of four heats, the Brazilian athlete saw her place in the final threatened after two falls in the laps, which earned her a score of 59.88, considered below the norm for her. This score would have to be added to two other well-executed maneuvers for the dream of qualifying to continue.
And so it was: with a score of 241.43 points, Rayssa Leal was closer to her second consecutive Olympic final, adding the highest maneuver score so far, a 92.68. With this score, she depended on the fourth heat, with five athletes, which featured her biggest opponents, including Funa Nakayama, bronze medalist in Tokyo. The road wasn’t easy, and the image of the favorite to be beaten was transformed into a humanized, fallible Rayssa.
The Olympic final was confirmed, despite coming seventh, something unlikely to imagine in the start of the competition. And this is undoubtedly due to the high level of the games, which put the Olympic motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” to the test through the extremely technical and well-executed maneuvers of the street skaters. And this was unthinkable when we look at the history of women’s skateboarding: considered an affront to femininity, they had to transform the scars into stories of struggle, treading a path surrounded by challenges until the moment of visibility and recognition they are experiencing today.
Gathering the eight bests in the world, the Olympic final is proof of skateboarding’s new sporting moment. The Olympic podium with Coco Yoshizawa (272.75), Liz Akama (265.95) and Rayssa Leal (241.43) and the mark of the highest scores awarded in women’s street skateboarding competitions – has 92.68 for Rayssa and 96.49 for the champion – were the proof. And so, we can ask: what comes after the medal? Quite apart from the individual challenges faced by Rayssa Leal, and the transformation of silver into bronze between the Tokyo and Paris Olympic editions, what we can see is the high level of women’s competitive scene in world skateboarding. And Rayssa was the only one in both Olympic podiums.
And that’s how she became the most consistent athlete that Sunday in the City of Light, despite the third place. For Rayssa, given the difficulties she faced, making the Olympic podium in the second edition of street skateboarding was an individual milestone, but also a very significant one. Far from a setback, the bronze she won in Paris was one of the pieces of evidence that the first Olympic cycle for street skateboarding was marked by better performances and new achievements for the sport, and that the Brazilian athlete was among them. Now we’ll have to wait for the next chapter, in Los Angeles, 2028.
