Sports

Daniele, the girl who didn’t like sports, embraced parabadminton and dreams

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As soon as he touched his racket for the first time, Daniele Souza, 29, thought: “Man, this is the sport for me. This is what I want.”

She just didn’t want to tell anyone that. Especially to her mother, Tereza. It would mean having to bend over backwards and admit being wrong. It took time to admit that.

One of the main names in Brazilian parabadminton, Daniele Souza hated sports. It didn’t cross his mind to practice any modality. Confused, irritable and frustrated, she was still trying, in 2012, at age 19, to adapt to life in a wheelchair. It was a fight.

“I finished high school in 2010. In my mind, there was nothing else to do. My life was over. I was trying to deal with everything that had happened to me in the previous years.”

Daniele had a nosocomial infection at birth. He spent his entire childhood and adolescence in medical treatment in the Federal District, at the Sarah Kubitschek Hospital. At age 11, in 2004, he began to have difficulty walking. A CT scan found that the infection was lodged in her spine.

He underwent three surgeries to try to correct the problem, without success. Months later, she stopped walking.
She became dependent on her mother or other family members for everything. Hence she felt that she had no future. This lasted until 2012, when Tereza came home and, without asking if her daughter wanted to or not, told her that she had enrolled at the Samambaia Olympic Center in Brasília.

“I won’t. I don’t like sports.”

“Who carries you everywhere?”

“The Lady.”

“Then it’s settled. You go.”

Daniele went. At first, he tried adapted tennis. He didn’t think it was as bad as he thought, but he didn’t like being in the sun. He listened to the suggestion of parabadminton, played in a gym, indoors.

The first time he practiced the sport, he fell in love. To this day, she can’t explain why, but she started training so much that she caught attention. It was just a hobby for her, but the technicians saw that it could be more. In 2013, without being consulted, she was entered in the Campeonato Brasiliense.

Once again, I didn’t want to go. She was drawn to participate. Or as Daniele would say, “loaded”.

“In this competition there was a draw and I was the only woman, so I would play against the boys. That alone made me afraid. In that draw, I fell to play against Rômulo Soares, a top athlete of the modality. At the time I said: ‘you they are crazy. I will not play, no.’.

But she played and was so embraced by the other athletes that she felt at home. She came home with four medals and an unshakable will to keep going. Parabadminton, as a hobby, was in the past. Just like Daniele she didn’t like sports.

Last month, she won the Parabadminton International Brasil, held at the Paralympic Training Center in São Paulo. She was South American champion in 2021.

His priority this year is the category’s Pan-American. In 2023, there will be the 2023 Parapan American Championship in Santiago, Chile. It is the natural path to the ultimate goal: a spot in the Paris Paralympics in 2024.

“Every athlete’s dream is to be in the Paralympics. But to get there, you need heavy training, very specific planning. I need stronger training for that. You have to have breakfast thinking about shuttlecock and dinner thinking about shuttlecock, the day everything. But we can achieve it”, he craves.

She currently trains from Tuesday to Friday, two hours a day. Want to increase the load.

“Parabadminton changed my life a lot. Before, I was dependent on other people. To go out, I needed my mother to go with me. Today I go out alone, I travel alone. The Daniele from before, the one from 2012, wouldn’t even be here talking to You. No way. She was very shy. Every now and then, there’s a movie in her head of everything that happened”, he admits.

And as a mother is a mother, Tereza, from time to time, reminds her of this with the phrase:

“See? If it wasn’t for me…”

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