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Sports
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By La Provence (with AFP)
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Footballer Paulinho, a scorer at the Tokyo Olympics, has become a symbol of the fight against religious intolerance in Brazil, with a celebration in tribute to Afro-Brazilian beliefs, whose followers are often persecuted in his country.
When the Bayer Leverkusen player stretched his left arm forward and brought his right hand close to the face, after scoring in Thursday’s 4-2 win over Germany, some thought he was mimicking the gesture lightning bolt from Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt.
But the 21-year-old striker was in fact mimicking the gesture of an archer, a tribute to Oxossi, an orixa (Afro-Brazilian deity) represented as a hunter.
In Yoruba mythology, which inspires the rites of the Brazilian Candomblé, Oxossi eradicated misery and hunger by shooting down a cursed bird with a single arrow.
The image of this celebration had a great impact on social networks in Brazil, where practitioners of Candomblé are regularly persecuted, their places of worship being vandalized, in particular by evangelical fundamentalists.
“Paulinho only needed a precise shot at the top of the window to make the cry of relief and pride of an entire people heard. Since Brazil has existed, Afro-Brazilian religions have been persecuted and demonized”, Wrote Flavia Oliveira, famous journalist and aunt of the player, in a column published Friday in the daily O Globo.
Most Brazilian footballers display their membership of Christian religions, like Neymar, who wore a banner with the expression “100% Jesus” when he received his Olympic gold medal at the Rio 2016 Olympics.
After his celebration, which has become iconic, Paulinho was invited to parade at the next carnival with the Mocidade samba school, which will pay tribute to Oxossi at the Sambodrome in Rio.
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