A professional athlete's career is quite short compared to other more "common" professions. An engineer, for example, continues working well into his 40s. This isn't the case for a volleyball player, a soccer player, or a swimmer. At 30, they're already considered experienced and often share a locker room with much younger colleagues. But of all sports, artistic gymnastics is perhaps the discipline that retires the earliest. Therefore, part of the job of Ney and Luisa Parente, Flamengo's coaches, is to seek out promising young athletes.

This Thursday (16), the coaches visited the Integrated Public Education Center (CIEP) Nação Rubro Negra, located next to the headquarters of Mais Querido, in Gávea. The objective was to evaluate the potential of students aged 5 and 6, and invite them to the gymnastics tryout, on December 2.

Among physical characteristics, height is an important piece of information about a young person's future in gymnastics. "It's a family genetics thing. If you see a child who is tall at six years old in a test, and the parents who were watching are tall, that's also a factor. The likelihood of becoming a tall young person is high," says Ney.

"Gymnastics works a lot based on the center of gravity, so this process works with what we call natural selection. Those with a short stature profile already have an advantage," adds Luisa, a former Flamengo gymnast with two Olympic appearances.

CIEP physical education teacher Mônica Turolla praised the club's initiative. "I think it's great because it's an opportunity for the students. We're neighbors, and we really want this to happen across all disciplines," she says.

"Sports are very important in these children's lives because they don't have any physical activity where they live, in the Rocinha community; their lives are very closed off. This is even more so now. So they come with a great desire to practice activities, and along with this desire, we apply sports initiations and all this motor coordination work," the teacher added.