Carla Oliveira was ten years old when she heard a nurse tell her mother that she had seven to eight years to live because of a rare disease that affects one in 500,000 children: girdle muscular dystrophy. Today she is 34 years old, a top athlete, European boccia champion and part of the Paris2024 Paralympic preparation program. The struggle against the wheelchair, until he discovered that it gave him back the freedom he had lost due to the disease, is a life story, just like the talent of the European champion in playing boccia.
Carla often fell ‘and thought she was just clumsy’. I didn’t run that fast, but I ran, I didn’t jump that high, but I jumped, and I could ride a bike, and that was what I “loved most.” But the calves of his legs, which were overdeveloped from the strain of always walking on his toes, caught the attention of his parents and that’s when he started “walking from doctor to doctor.”
They told him it was a problem with his Achilles tendon, that all he had to do was operate and everything would be fine… But the restrictions increased so much that he could no longer wash his face or comb his hair. A muscle biopsy and electromyography previously diagnosed limb-girdle muscular dystrophy, a rare disease with an associated life expectancy. He tried different therapies, went to different doctors and some charlatans: “Now it is absurd to think that we believe in the promised cure of 99%, but at the time it was desperation, trying to find a solution.”
The most critical period “would have been at the age of 12 years”, at the stage of adolescence and the formation of an identity that the disease wanted to steal from him. The laughter of her colleagues, with every fall she took, still echoes in the athlete’s memory and affected her confidence and self-esteem. Bullying at school would be the least of your problems. Carla would no longer be independent at the age of 15: “I fought against the wheelchair to the limit of my body.”
During that time, he clung to faith, God and his mother’s help. Fernanda Silva had to stop work to take her daughter to school, physiotherapy, water aerobics… Being (and still being) very sociable, she began to realize that “that device was not the enemy”, on the contrary, it gave her the freedom back to go to school, mall and even going out in the evening.
Accepting the wheelchair happened before Boccia came into his life for good, at the age of 20. He had once, when he was 14, played bocce in the old Estádio das Antas (now Dragão) and didn’t like it. “I never had a sports culture. It was one thing to think about the vibration of football, another to think about throwing a few balls on the ground, and I didn’t even really understand the meaning of the game .I didn’t like it at all, but Mr. José Rodrigues, from FC Porto, called me one day, after I finished my studies [Educação Social] and the master’s degree [Ciências da Educação] I stopped having excuses. Overcome with fatigue, I decided to try it, without any obligation,” she told DN, explaining that she trained once a week.
After three months of training, she went to a competition and fell in love with the sport. He says he learned to be an athlete, gained discipline and dedication to training and went on to compete for FC Porto. In 2012 she was called up to the national team and a year later she lifted her first World Cup trophy. She was selected to go to Rio 2016 due to quota, was ashamed of this positive discrimination and tried to go to Tokyo 2020 on merit. And even the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t stop her from getting there. It came in 4th place, the most “glorious” of them all.
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Carla Oliveira (@carlasoliveira_)
Gold pregnancy and medal after becoming a mother
Carla then met her husband, Agostinho Cardoso, during a master’s internship and became pregnant. “Intimacy happened naturally, I’m not sexually limited. He knew he was undressing me, but he had to dress me too [risos]. This created much more closeness. Discomfort became comfort. I tell him that we can’t get upset because he has to hug me every time he takes me from the chair to the car, to the couch or to the bed,” he said without any complexity.
She had an uneventful pregnancy, without nausea or bad mood, and the trainers only found out about it after three months of pregnancy. At the 2022 Póvoa do Varzim Open, she was five months pregnant and won gold. Happiness camouflaged fears. I didn’t know if I would continue Boccia after becoming a mother and how my body would handle the weight of my belly.. And if she wanted to give up quality time with her daughter to train and compete: “I had Gabi and my fears disappeared. Three months later, in February of this year, I started training gradually, but I couldn’t keep up the pace and I reduced the training load. I felt unprepared for the European Championship, but my daughter’s presence there and good family support helped compensate for the physical part and gave me the motivation I needed to become champion (BC4 class). “
Going to the European Championships was only possible because FC Porto and the Portuguese Paralympic Committee gave him the conditions to do so. “I was breastfeeding and that meant I had to take an extra person with me. In addition to the sports assistant, I needed someone to stay with my daughter and I chose my mother, but I paid her accommodation and travel costs,” she says.
Today he regrets that the doctors never told him to play sports, and that the physical education teachers never told him about adaptive sports. As part of the MAVI (Movement to Support Independent Life) pilot project, Carla has a personal assistant and good support from family and employers: “I live five minutes from Estádio do Dragão, where I work in the Adapted Sports Department of FC Porto, the club I represent. Just go up one floor with the elevator and I’m in the training room. And it makes it easier to have a club, colleagues and an employer who understand the demands of high performance.”
Carla is in 5th place in the world rankings that guarantee Paris2024 and dream of an Olympic medal. Only a stage will surpass ‘this magical moment’ of playing Boccia in a pavilion with 10,000 people, as happened in Rio 2016, and allow us to give everything back to the sport: ‘Otherwise I feel fulfilled.’
Source: DN
