Representations of female athletes in Brazilian Sitting Volleyball

Abstract

Sitting volleyball is characterized as a Paralympic sport, practiced in Brazil since 2002 by men and women who have some kind of physical disability. In order to give women a voice as athletes with disabilities in the sporting context, as well as to preserve the memory of Brazilian Paralympic sport, the research aims to outline the courses of athletes from the Brazilian women's volleyball team who participated in the 2012 Paralympic Games, in London, and 2016, in Rio de Janeiro. Therefore, the information was collected through semi-structured interviews, using the Cultural History of Sport and Sports Memory as theoretical assumptions. We show that the sports trajectories of the five investigated athletes include the rapid rise in their careers, possibly influenced by the lack of diffusion of the sport among women with physical disabilities in Brazil at the time when their insertions in Paralympic sport occurred. In the athletes' perception, the entry into high-performance sport has intensely influenced their life paths, changing their representations about disability and sport.