Beatriz Ferreira: The Brazilian star that stands between Kellie Harrington and Olympic gold

Fri, 06 Aug, 2021 - 11:38

Brendan O'Brien, Tokyo

Beatriz Ferreira does a little dance after every fight. When she saw off Finland’s Mira Marjut Johanna Potkonen in Thursday’s semi-final she went through all the moves and broke out into a beaming grin as she acknowledged her small but boisterous cheering section up in the rafters.

"I have been doing this dance for some time now," she explained shortly after adding another dominant performance to a CV that is littered with references of the same stripe. "I’m confident to use it because it helps me to relax and to express how happy I am by winning."

It’s about the only playful side we’ve seen to the Brazilian ‘army athlete’ who has otherwise been nothing but business in making it through to Sunday's women’s lightweight decider against Kellie Harrington.

Ferreira has fought three times here and all have been won by unanimous decision.

She has made the podium in 29 out of her last 30 competitions and her record across various events as listed on the Olympic website is, bar one blip, an exercise in some sort of binary code.

1, 17, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2.

World champion in 2019, she has been top dog at the Pan American Games and Pan American Championships. She has won the Strandja Memorial in Sofia three times and she came away from the Cologne Boxing World Cup earlier this year with the title.

Harrington may be the top seed here, but Ferreira is ranked number one in the lightweight rankings.

Now 28, she is the daughter of a two-time Brazilian champion, Raimundo Ferreira. Her immersion in the sport is complete. She was coaching by the age of 15 and it was announced earlier this year that she was to become an ambassador for the AIBA’S Youth World Boxing Championships in Poland.

The story goes that she started boxing at the age of four. Unable to fight in official competitions through her early teens, she made do with honing her craft in training but more than made up for lost time when she first got to enter the Brazilian boxing championships.

Entering the heavier 69kg division, she faced off against a taller rival and promptly knocked her opponent out inside the opening 30 seconds. If this all seems a bit ‘Rocky’ then the Brazilian Olympic Committee clearly took note and soon had her drafted into their programme.

Ferreira’s performance against Uzbekistan’s Raykhona Kodirova in the quarter-finals here spoke for the venomous threat she brings. It was a brutal display of aggression but it was controlled not wild. The Uzbek looked beaten and entirely subjugated long before the nine minutes had elapsed.

Potkonen had clearly taken note before their semi-final, the veteran Finnish fighter starting off on the front foot and attempting to fight fire with fire. It didn’t work. Ferreira had computed the situation and adapted accordingly by the time the first round was half over and Bernard Dunne believes that semi-final showed a different side to the bullish Brazilian.

“If you’d watched the fight with Potkonen, she wasn’t aggressive actually,” said the Irish boxing team’s high-performance manager and team leader in Tokyo. “She was very passive in what she did and actually countered with the right quite a lot.” Dunne likes to highlight the importance of the wider Irish team when discussing his fighters in public but Brazil can point to a similarly engaged collective. They too have seven boxers here in Japan and they have gone one better than Ireland by claiming three medals.

There is no huge tradition of Olympic boxing in Brazil. Servillo de Oliveira won a bronze in Mexico City in 1968 but their next didn’t come until 2012 when they claimed a silver and two bronze while Robson Conceicao earned their only ribbon in Rio.

That, at least, was for gold.

The Brazilians have been putting money and structures in place the last dozen years but they ushered in a younger generation of boxers after 2016 and had pinned their hopes on Paris rather than Tokyo.

Now here they are with as many medals in boxing as they have managed across volleyball, judo and sailing, three sports that have been a more habitual source of success for them in past Summer Games.

“We already have three medals guaranteed,” said Ferreira earlier this week.

“But we are training for the gold. We want the highest place on the podium.”