Isabel left fighting daughters in volleyball and everywhere else

There are a lot of clichés when we try to talk about death. Perhaps the biggest one is that it represents the end of everything. Died, ended, disappeared, forgot, succumbed. But there are those who, so grandiose on this plane, make death synonymous with life, with eternity. Those who do not allow their verbs to be conjugated in the past, as they are present, are presence even in physical absence. This is Isabel Salgado. Or, simply, Isabel from volleyball.

And this text, after all, is not to talk about death. There is life after. For Isabel, there always will be. The woman who paved the victorious paths of women’s indoor and beach volleyball in Brazil left behind five biological children. And I wouldn’t know how to count how many of us there are, Isabel’s daughters in every corner of this country — daughters of struggle.

In a society that insists on telling us how we have to behave, how we have to dress, what we should be, where we should step… Isabel showed no. It is not others who will shape us. The beautiful, demure, at home, idealized by the customs of a past that, in her time, was present, became beautiful, daring, court, sport, politics, fight.

Could there be greater daring than showing up pregnant to train, play, compete in championships, while society tried to imprison women’s bodies and determine the places where they belonged (in the limits of the house, the kitchen, domestic/maternal tasks)? Isabel showed us that freedom of life is our freedom of struggle, and we will not run away from it, nor give it up.

The one who inherited her blood, Carol Solberg, also inherited her fight when she had her two children without stopping playing and looking for the minimum conditions to pursue a career in beach volleyball without giving up being a mother.

Player, coach, pioneer, inspiration, role model. Every woman who dared to challenge the sport’s status quo —which has always exalted men as champions and women as muses— is today a “daughter of Isabel”.

Fabi Alvim, two-time Olympic champion, feminist, LGBT activist, daughter of Isabel. Joanna Maranhão, former swimmer and Olympic athlete, feminist, active voice against corrupt management in Brazilian sport, daughter of Isabel. Aline Silva, world runner-up in Olympic wrestling, a black woman who seeks to open paths so that others like her also have the chance to go further, daughter of Isabel.

We, sports women, who fight for space in such a sexist, misogynistic, racist and lgbtphobic environment, daughters of Isabel. There is no real death for those who leave an eternal legacy. Eternal Elizabeth.