🏈 Brazil’s unflagging Olympic ambition

Low contact, high drama? Brazil eyes LA2028 flag football spot

In 2011, Cris Kajiwara, an avid fan of São Paulo football club Corinthians, was completely unaware of the existence of American football in Brazil — much less flag football, the reduced-pitch low-contact variation of the sport, which will make its Olympic debut at the Los Angeles games in 2028.

Ten years later, Kajiwara became president of the country’s American football confederation, the CBFA, and will now lead Brazil’s flag football teams on their quest for Olympic qualification.

“I was on Twitter, following accounts related to Corinthians, and I clicked on one called Corinthians FA … I thought it was another fan club.” The mixup is not hard to understand (the Brazilian Portuguese word for fan is fã), but the “FA” in the name of the account she unwittingly followed actually stood for futebol americano, American football.

Speaking to The Brazilian Report, she explained how she began making friends with the organizers of Corinthians’ then-nascent American football setup, and eventually offered her business management expertise to help out with the administrative side of running a small-time sports club.

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