chasing pele

“What games did you see?”

That’s the first thing people ask when you say that you were in Brazil for the World Cup. Only, I didn’t see any games. Not in the stadium anyway. It was my job to shoot interviews, news conferences and training sessions for TV stations that couldn’t be there. You want English answers from Belgian players? I’m your man.

I found out I was going to Brazil when I was covering F1 winter testing in Jerez. The teams I was going to cover were Belgium, Mexico, Costa Rica plus Bosnia and Herzegovina. We weren’t going to see the Christ the Redeemer or Sugarloaf mountain — we were heading to Santos.

Santos is on the coast about 70 kilometres southeast of Sao Paulo and it’s home to around 400,000 people — roughly the same size as Liverpool. Brazil is huge, but Santos is relatively small and affluent. It’s one of the world’s biggest ports — with huge tankers and shipping containers floating across the horizon. Favelas do exist there, but most people we met had enough money to enjoy a beer, a run on the beach and some live music.

Santos is really only famous for one thing: Pelé.

It’s the city where he scored all those goals you never saw. It’s where he laid a path to become a legend.

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