Rebeca Andrade
Tore the same knee ligament three times and still became Brazil's greatest ever gymnast
Rebeca Andrade grew up in Guarulhos, near Sao Paulo, one of eight children whose mother worked cleaning houses to pay for her gymnastics lessons, which began when Andrade was four. She showed enough talent early on to be considered a future star of Brazilian gymnastics, but her senior career was interrupted almost as soon as it began.
In 2015 she tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee, an injury that typically takes a year to recover from. She came back, competed at the 2016 Rio Olympics in front of a home crowd, and then tore the same ligament again in 2017. She recovered a second time, made her World Championships debut in 2018, and then suffered a third tear to the same knee in 2019, an injury that ends most gymnastics careers outright.
She refused to stop. At the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021 she won silver in the all-around and gold in the vault, becoming the first Brazilian woman to win an Olympic gymnastics medal, then gold. Three years later in Paris she won gold on floor, silver in the all-around and vault, and a team bronze, finishing as the most decorated Brazilian and Latin American gymnast in history.
Her routines, built around Brazilian music and dance, made her one of the most recognisable gymnasts of her generation, and her repeated recoveries from the same catastrophic injury have made her a reference point for athletes rebuilding a career from nothing more than once.