Of the 14 players who will be part of Yaras (as the Brazilian rugby team is known), 10 will make their debut at the Olympic Games in Tokyo. The two of them have something else to celebrate besides the fact that they represent Brazil on the other side of the world. Talia and Thalita da Silva Costa are twins and they are together in Japan.
For Thaleta, who has been part of the Brazilian national team since January 2019, the challenge is to improve the result achieved through selection at the 2016 Olympics, in Rio de Janeiro, to ninth place. “We have good results, our expectations are high, as well as the anxiety. We want to develop and do better than Brazil did in Rio, I played with the rugby team XV and the beach rugby team. I am really looking forward to making history in the rugby team 7. Our team is very good. We can have a lot of problems with the selections. We just need to improve some details.” Brazil Agency.
“Of course we will go in search of the best possible result. But no matter where we are, being in the national team alongside my sister and embarking on the dream of representing our country in the East increases my happiness even more. I think Thalia, who has been a member of the Yaras team since July 2018, says Our dream could not be achieved in a more perfect way.”
Currently, the two players are athletes from one of the main teams in the country, Delta, from Piaui. But the path in the sport began by chance, in 2017. “I was in athletics, I didn’t even know rugby. But a friend insisted that we train, and I ended up accepting it and liked it a lot. That was earlier that year. Took My sister takes a little longer,” Thalia recalls.
“I stopped doing physical activities for a long time. It really took a while to stay firm in rugby training. It only happened at the insistence of the technicians. But then I ended up falling in love,” says Thalita.
The women’s rugby tournament will be held at the Tokyo Games from July 29-31. The women’s team fell into Group B, along with Canada (bronze at Rio 2016), France and Fiji. The first two of each of the top three and three groups advance to the quarter-finals. The current Olympic champion, Australia tops Group C, along with the United States, China and Japan. New Zealand, the 2018 world champions, is in Group A, along with the United Kingdom, Kenya and the Russian Olympic Committee.