Why are Brazilians booing at all of the American events at the 2016 Olympics? Originally answered on August 7th, 2016.
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Answer by Michael Kang, who lives in Brazil:
First of all, Brazilians aren’t booing American athletes in all sports. We weren’t (as far as I know) booing you guys at events like shooting, archery, swimming, cycling, gymnastics, judo, rowing, canoe slalom, and equestrian, for example (although some of these seem somewhat unlikely to get any booing at all).
Now on to the sports in which we were booing the US at times:
Women’s soccer
This is the one that earned the US most of its boos. The reason for this, as you may already know, was because of a particular photo US goalkeeper Hope Solo posted online that many of us thought was a bit disrespectful and insensitive. In the photo in question, Solo was overreacting to the Zika crisis happening in Brazil (which is more of a problem in poorer areas of the Northeastern states than it is in Rio) — or at least that’s how Brazilians saw it. So in every game the USWST played, Brazilians would boo whenever she had the ball, shouting “ZIKA!” right after.
They didn’t boo the team itself as much as Hope Solo.
Other sports
Brazilians weren’t just booing the US; When Brazil (or Argentina) wasn’t playing, they would cheer for the weaker teams and players. For example, in soccer’s S. Korea 8 x 0 Fiji, they were cheering for Fiji since it had the weaker team. But when that same S. Korean team was playing against Germany, they cheered for Korea. Another example would be basketball’s US vs. China matchup. It was quite obvious who would win, so we cheered whenever the Chinese scored, while also cheering when the NBA stars did their awesome dunks and stuff.
Since US athletes and teams are usually among the best, Brazilians tended to cheer for the opposite side, which meant that the Americans would get booed at times. It’s all in harmless fun, though. We don’t have anything against Team USA.
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