Published in August 2016, this profile by Instituto PACS centres on athletics coach Edneida Freire, 51, and the closure of the Célio de Barros Athletics Stadium — shut to the public in January 2013 to receive rubble from the Maracanã works and later paved over for a parking lot. A former Brazilian pentathlon champion who trained roughly 800 athletes and children daily, Edneida recounts how the closure displaced high-level competitors and the children of social projects alike, forcing them to train in public parks without proper equipment. The text presents the loss of the stadium as a serious human rights violation carried out without dialogue, and uses Edneida’s trajectory to denounce how the right to sport was sacrificed in the very city hosting the world’s largest sporting event. It is part of a series of life stories of women in the Olympic city.

The text was originally published on PACS’s Medium and later made available in PDF for public consultation in the library’s digital archive.

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