The process of establishing, spreading and consolidating football in Rio de Janeiro was framed by the complex and contradictory relations involving, on the one hand, the clubs of the social elite in the rich neighbourhoods of the Zona Sul [South Zone] and on the other, the working class clubs beside the railway lines serving the suburban regions where most of the workers lived.¹ The distance between the clubs in these two football worlds was not just geographical but also social and racial, demarcating the symbolic frontiers of a game of power which football was both invested in, reinforcing it in many ways, and opposed to, subverting it in crucial areas.

As the popularity of this European sport grew in Rio, the main clubs in the city – Flamengo, Botafogo, Fluminense and Vasco da Gama – began recruiting more and more players from the distant suburbs, neighbouring cities and even from the favelas, the shanty towns scattered across the hills surrounding the Zona Sul. Resistance to the presence of poor and black players in the teams of the social elite was slowly overcome by a pragmatic calculation driven by the agonistic appeal of the spectacle, which represented a change in stance justified by the ideology of racial democracy propagated in the country since the 1930s.

The correlated narratives of Brazil as the country of football and racial democracy were mutually reinforcing, projecting a distorted and idealised notion of Brazil both internally and externally that would become clearer after the country’s success at the 1958 World Cup. In the newspaper Jornal dos Sports, the writer and playwright Nelson Rodrigues stressed the historical value of that sporting feat: ‘Many might think, with absolute obtuseness, that Sweden was just about the success of a football team.’ That would be a mistake, according to the author, for whom 1958 was above all the ‘victory of all the downtrodden and neglected people in Brazil’, among whom he highlighted the ‘pingente da Central’.²

Nelson Rodrigues’s comment is a perfect example of the narrative behind the construction of Brazil as a footballing nation, followed by the sport’s symbolic power to redeem the Brazilian people. In addition to these two interlinked aspects, however, the writer also focuses on the pingentes on the Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil [Brazilian Central Railway]. Familiar to the local residents, the pingentes were a feature of the urban landscape and aroused mixed feelings of anxiety and admiration, both glorified in the lyrics of samba music and loathed by the newspapers. In fact, the papers contained news about them every day, albeit relegated to the crime pages. Therefore, we will look more closely at the pingentes, since, as I hope to show, it will take us to the heart of the footballing mythology created after Brazil’s triumph at the World Cup in 1958.

In the 1950s, the Rio papers reported on the routine occurrence of passengers falling fatally onto the train tracks. Day after day, readers would see short reports about teenage students, young men from the suburbs or factory workers who lost their balance and fell onto the tracks while dangling from the outside of the train, like a pendant, ie pingentes, and suffering physical harm or ‘instant death’.³ Sometimes, the reports noted the horrific nature of these accidents. An example occurred at one of the stations on the Central do Brasil in late 1953, when an ‘unknown person’, said to be travelling in the early morning as a ‘pingente’, fell from the train ‘unnoticed’ and was found ‘under the wheels of one of the carriages’.⁴

The Rio de Janeiro press compiled short reports on the bodies dismembered by the wheels under the carriages transporting workers from the suburbs to town and back again, in a back-and-forth movement that revealed the anonymous lives to which these people were destined. Whether falling under the trains or colliding with one of the posts beside the tracks, a tragic death awaited the pingentes around every curve.⁵ The risk, however, did not deter the ‘boys in the flower of their youth’ from foregoing their suicidal behaviour. On the contrary, they seemed ever keener on a risk which, in the eyes of opinion leaders, appeared a ‘strange sport’, practised with ‘amazing lightness’, thanks to a technique that involved the skill of jumping on a moving train and travelling by clinging to the outside of the carriages.⁶

This risky sport had unwritten rules, codes of honour and rival teams based on the territorial recruitment of young men in the huge and diverse suburbs of Rio or the municipalities that made up the Baixada Fluminense. The risky behaviour implied a skill at ‘dribbling’ past the obstacles which arose during the trip, such as the ‘Bellini Post’ in particular. Located between the stations of Engenho de Dentro and Encantado, this was responsible for a series of accidents on the branch line that passed by the front of the Maracanã stadium. Due to the difficulty of getting around it, the pingentes gave it the name ‘Bellini’, an allusion to the physical strength and macho style of the Vasco da Gama centre back and Brazilian team captain who ‘nobody could get past’.7 This name reveals how much the symbolic world of the train passengers was interconnected with that of football fans. In fact, the pingente on the Central do Brasil and the fan in the Maracanã’s geral were two sides of the same person. The geral held around 35,000 of the total 155,000 capacity of the stadium and was located in the cheap ground-level section of the stadium with standing room only, where the crowded fans had a poor view of the pitch. These precarious conditions were similar to those offered by the rail system, as the Jornal dos Sports recognised: ‘There’s a lot more space in a tin of sardines than in a train full of football fans.’⁸

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