How a bunk bed acrobat from a favela in Brazil became the #2 female gymnast in the world

In America, all eyes were on gymnast Simone Biles as she won the gold medal in the individual all-around finals on Thursday — the third time she’d conquered this demanding category in her illustrious Olympics history.

Brazil, meanwhile, went wild over the silver medalist, Rebeca Andrade, who’d previously dazzled in Paris with the highest score on vault in the team finals earlier this week. She’s being called a “national treasure.”

It’s no surprise that the two gymnasts finished one-two. Biles has said of Andrade: "She scares me most." Biles edged out Andrade in the all-around category by only 1.199 points.

Georgette Vidor, a gymnastics coach at the club in Rio de Janeiro where Andrade currently trains, sees a lot of similarities between the two athletes: “[Andrade and Biles] are competitors, not rivals. They are two Black women from humble backgrounds who are the greatest gymnasts out there right now,” Vidor told NPR. “They have a beautiful story of resilience.”

From a favela to fame

One of 8 children raised by a single mother, Rebeca Andrade grew up in a favela in the outskirts of Guarulhos, São Paulo — one of many overcrowded slums with houses that look like shacks near Brazil’s city centers.

The gymnast says that her first experience with “acrobatics” came when she climbed and hung upside down from the bunk beds she shared with her siblings. Andrade has said those bunk beds are where it all began.

So how did she go from bunk beds to global fame? According to an interview her mother, Rosa Rodrigues, gave to Brazilian news outlet G1 in 2021, Andrade’s aunt happened to start working at a gymnasium in the same week they were holding gymnastics tryouts. Her aunt brought Andrade with her.

Andrade’s natural talent was noticed right away. After her impressive tryout, she earned the nickname “Daianinha” or “mini Daiane” — a reference to Daiane dos Santos, a famous Brazilian gymnast who was the first Black woman and first South American to win the a gymnastics medal in the 2003 World Championships.

That was where Andrade would go on to train from ages 4 to 9 years old.

The ticket to her dreams

Rebeca’s mother, who worked as a maid, couldn’t always afford to pay for her daughter’s bus ticket to the gym. Andrade and her older brother began to walk for 2 hours each way to get to her gym on days when their mother couldn’t afford a bus ticket.

“If I am not mistaken, the distance from our house to the gym was 6 or 7 kilometers [about 3 to 4 miles] with a lot [of hills] going up and down,” said Rebeca’s older brother, Emerson Rodrigues, in an interview in 2023. “When we would get there — to the gym, I would collect cardboard, [scrap] metal, those types of things, and I would sell it nearby and would save up a coin here and there until I started building a bike in a junkyard. So, on the days we didn’t have money [for bus tickets] — which were 90% or more [of the time] — we would ride the bike."

The ticket to her dreams

Andrade was only able to pursue her dreams because of an initiative funded by the city of Guarulhos called “sports initiation,” which offers sports scholarships to kids of underserved backgrounds like Andrade.

At the time Andrade was training in Guarulhos, Mônica Barroso dos Anjos was coaching at that gym. After training Andrade for a year and a half, the coach placed her in the “high-achieving group” – the group of girls that got to participated in competitions. Barroso dos Anjos has described Andrade in an interview as obedient and dedicated, but “terribly restless.”

After wowing judges in the 2009 Junior Pan-American Games, Andrade, who was then about 10 years old, was invited to join the Paraná Center for Excellence in Gymnastics to train professionally. This required her to move to the neighboring state, Paraná, without her family.

In a 2021 interview, Andrade explained that moving states as a child didn’t scare her. “I saw it as a way to improve the lives of my entire family, so I did everything with a lot of love,” she recalled.

After moving to Curitiba, Paraná, Andrade’s career took off. At age 11, she received an offer to sign a contract with the junior gymnastics team at Flamengo, one of the best gymnastics clubs in the country, where she has trained for the last 14 years.

Rebeca Andrade’s story of resilience is familiar to many gymnasts in Brazil. Her teammate, Flávia Saraiva also benefitted from a philanthropic initiative, called “Sports for all” and sponsored by the NGO QualiVida, which was co-founded by Georgette Vidor in partnership with the Rio de Janeiro government. (Vidor is pictured below, in the wheelchair she's used since a bus accident in 1997, surrounded by colleagues and kids.) The initiative brings free twice-weekly gymnastics training to public school children across the state.

Vidor believes that Andrade’s current success is a combination of a lot of talent and hard work — but also some luck. Access to good gyms and government support is limited to states with large metropolitan areas like São Paulo, Paraná and Rio de Janeirto. So Andrade and Saraiva were born in the right place to succeed in gymnastics.

“We miss out on thousands of talented kids in Brazil,” Vidor said. “They can have all the talent in the world, but they are never discovered because they don’t even have a place to practice,” said Vidor. “Rebeca is certainly ahead of the curve. But we may never have found her if she was born somewhere else in the country.”

The cost barrier

You only need to look at the fees for gymnastics classes to understand the obstacles for families who face financial stress. In 2023, the monthly fee for 3 gymnastics lessons per week at Flamengo was of $523 reais — about $92. That's the equivalent of 40% of the minimum monthly wage in Brazil. So, low-income families like Andrade’s have to rely on programs that offer free training. “Before you get a club sponsorship you depend on social initiatives that allow low-income kids to train for free,” said Vidor.

Vidor says that most of the high-achieving gymnasts she has trained in the last 40+ years have been from low-income backgrounds.

“Out of the 47 girls I am training right now, I can tell you that maybe 7 are middle-class, the rest are low-income. The majority of the girls here live in slums,” said the coach.

Vidor believes that the potential for financial stability is what attracts so many low-income kids to the sport despite the barriers to entry. For those who come from poverty, like Andrade, it represents a way out.

“Gymnastics is very tough. You don’t get holidays, you train on Saturdays, you have little vacation time. So, people in Brazil with a lot of money — they don’t want their kids to do gymnastics. They want to travel on weekends, they want long vacations. This doesn’t work in gymnastics,” said Vidor. “So instead, you get parents who see gymnastics as a way for their kids to have a better life, to travel, to get better education, to have access to better doctors. It becomes a way to achieve their dreams.”

Andrade’s reality today is very different from when she first walked into the gym in Guarulhos 21 years ago. “Today, Rebeca is considered rich in our country," said Vidor. "Her mom used to work as a maid for years. Now, she is in France watching her daughter. Rebeca was able to give her that through gymnastics. The house she is building for her family, it is all because of her success in gymnastics. Flávia, too; everything she has achieved has been through gymnastics.”

Andrade’s success has been very motivating to the kids Vidor is training, who all watched Brazil win their first Olympic team medal on Thursday. “The girls [in the gym] were ecstatic and jumping up and down. It is so important for them to see this,” she said. “They dream of having a better life through the sport.”