In unequal Brazil, a surfing talent rises from the favela

RIO DE JANEIRO — Down a tight alley, up stairs wet from a leaky roof, inside a cramped apartment, a boy has a dream. He wants a better life, one in which the cupboards aren’t bare and his unemployed mother doesn’t have to worry about finding work.

The vehicle to that future lies tucked behind the small television: a battered surfboard highlighted in red and yellow.

Nearly every day, 14-year-old Fabrício Conceição de Jesus grabs the board, walks down those stairs and transitions from the world of the favela — where he’s another kid struggling to survive in an unequal society — to the world of surfing, where he’s considered one of Rio’s most promising new surfing talents.

“I’m going pro,” Fabrício says. “I know it.”

In recent years, Brazil has become a surfing powerhouse, challenging the historic dominance of the United States and Australia. The top three male surfers in the championship tour rankings are all Brazilian.

One of them, Ítalo Ferreira, just brought home Olympic gold in the men’s shortboard. He’s part of new generation of surfers known as the Brazilian Storm.

Their dominance is inspiring kids along Brazil’s 4,600-mile coastline to pick up a board. But surfing isn’t soccer, the sport that poor Brazilians historically have seen as a way out of poverty. Surfing is a pastime of the middle and upper classes. It can cost as much as $1,000 for a board. More to travel and master waves elsewhere in the world.

In a country where class typically corresponds to race, few surfers are Black.

But Fabrício isn’t concerned about that. He knows his family was going hungry in the northeastern state of Bahia, before his mother came to Rio in search of work. She ultimately earned enough money cleaning houses to bring the whole family down.

But rather than dwelling on that story, he obsesses over wave breaks and wind conditions, hoping his talents will be enough to overcome the advantages enjoyed by his better-funded rivals.

“Fabrício is one of the names now in surfing in Rio, and all that’s missing for him are the opportunities,” said his surfing coach, Dionisio Santos. “He’s an athlete with the talent that could take him really far.”

He’s been surfing for only four years — some of his opponents began when they were 5 or 6 — but has already secured an athletic scholarship to a local private school. Wealthier surfers bought him a board, and he has since made it to the finalists’ podium in nearly every competition in which he has participated.

Now it was time again to surf. He grabbed his board, walked across the street on the fringes of Rio and made it to the water. He looked out into the green-blue water and then raced in. Within minutes, he caught a wave that he hoped would help carry him to a better life.

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Credits

Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Video editing by Alexa Ard.