521- A Sea of Yellow

Episode Summary

Title: A Sea of Yellow Background: - In 2017, 99% Invisible did an episode about the history of Brazil's iconic yellow national soccer jersey. - The jersey's origins trace back to Brazil's heartbreaking loss in the 1950 World Cup final. After that defeat, Brazil held a contest to redesign the national team's uniform. A 19-year-old named Aldir Garcia-Slez won with his design of a yellow shirt with green trim. - The yellow jersey became a beloved symbol of Brazil, uniting the country across class and racial divides. Updates: - In recent years, Brazil's far-right movement has adopted the yellow jersey as a symbol of nationalism and support for right-wing leaders like Jair Bolsonaro. - This caused many Brazilian soccer fans, especially those on the left, to stop wearing the jersey to avoid being seen as Bolsonaro supporters. - When Lula da Silva was elected president in late 2022, he tried to reclaim the yellow jersey as a symbol for all Brazilians. However, the January 8th riots showed the jersey is still firmly associated with the far-right. - Some have suggested Brazil should abandon the yellow jersey, but most think it will remain, though now irreparably politicized.

Episode Show Notes

The shifting symbolism of Brazil's iconic yellow soccer jersey

Episode Transcript

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SPEAKER_04: When a Brazilian soccer player scores a goal, the announcer starts slow. SPEAKER_10: And it builds. Until it reaches a glorious crescendo. SPEAKER_07: They do this all over the world now, but it started in Brazil and there's something particularly triumphant about it there. SPEAKER_10: That's producer Joe Sykes. SPEAKER_07: That's because soccer means so much to Brazil. SPEAKER_02: How can I explain what soccer means to Brazilians without sounding corny, but I think I'm going to have to sound corny, okay? SPEAKER_07: That's Fernando Duarte, a BBC journalist who wrote a book about Brazilian soccer. Soccer, or football as I call it being British, arrived in Brazil in the late 19th century. At first it was a game played in elite circles and in cities, but poor and working-class Brazilians struggled to make the game their own. SPEAKER_04: The only time the elites were robbed or they were deprived of something by the poor people or by the common folk is when football ceased to be a game for the elites and it became a mass sport. SPEAKER_10: Soccer eventually became so popular and beloved in Brazil that their national team soccer jersey has become as much a national symbol as the country's flag. You're going to see many more people in Brazil wearing their shirts than waving the flag. SPEAKER_04: There's a sense of belonging. No matter if you're peanuts picking up old soda cans on the street or if you're a millionaire, when you wear that shirt you're just like one of us. SPEAKER_11: Those shirts are extraordinary. They are scintillating. In fact I think the word is coruscating. SPEAKER_07: That's the soccer writer and historian David Goldblatt. There are flashes of diamond light coming off of those shirts. SPEAKER_10: The Brazilian soccer shirts are so iconic that non-soccer fans all over the world can often picture them. But for those of you who can't, the shirt is a bright canary yellow with green trim around the collar and sleeves. They're worn with blue shorts, a pure primary blue. Compared with other soccer jerseys, the uniform is joyful and bold. It seems to capture something essential about Brazil. But it wasn't always this way. SPEAKER_07: In fact Brazil used to play in plain unremarkable white shirts. SPEAKER_10: The story of how the uniform changed goes back 70 years to an epic soccer game that Brazilians will never forget. After years of lobbying, the World Cup arrived in Brazil in 1950. At the time, the country was culturally and internationally kind of unknown. This was Brazil's big moment to show the world what it was made of. SPEAKER_11: The 1950 World Cup was understood by the Brazilian population as an opportunity to say to the world, Brazil has arrived. SPEAKER_07: They knew this World Cup was their chance to tell everyone. SPEAKER_11: We have modernized, we have been transformed, we've moved from being an agricultural plantation economy to a new urban industrialized economy and this is our way of showing it. SPEAKER_07: The main symbol of that coming out, apart from what was happening on the soccer field, was the stadium named the Maracanar in Rio de Janeiro. SPEAKER_11: It looks like the stadium from outer space. I mean it is this fabulous, flat, white concrete oval with amazing flying buttresses. SPEAKER_07: It looks like this huge flying saucer that had dropped down in the center of the city. But done with this sort of incredible sort of modernist elegance. SPEAKER_11: I mean it was the greatest stadium built since the Colosseum. SPEAKER_07: So they had the stadium, the people were behind them, the government was pushing the tournament whenever possible. Now all they needed was a successful team. SPEAKER_04: The expectations were high because of this whole climate, this whole atmosphere of optimism. SPEAKER_07: In one of their earlier games, Brazil strode confidently onto the field in their white uniforms and proceeded to demolish Sweden 7-1. Brazil were absolutely fantastic in the opening rounds. SPEAKER_11: They were slaughtering everybody, they were scoring goals all over the place. They beat Spain 6-1. SPEAKER_07: They also beat Mexico and Yugoslavia. The tournament was going exactly to plan. SPEAKER_04: It was this whole atmosphere of like sporting bliss. And all they had to do is get a draw of Uruguay in the last match. SPEAKER_07: Because of a quirk in the tournament structure, all Brazil had to do to win the World Cup was tie against Uruguay in their final game. SPEAKER_10: Uruguay historically had been a really strong team, even though they're a tiny country, almost 50 times smaller than Brazil. But by the time this 1950 World Cup came along, Uruguay was a waning power in soccer. So beating them, or at least tying them, seemed totally doable, not a problem. SPEAKER_07: Still Uruguay was no pushover, especially when they were playing against Brazil. Uruguay actually used to be a Brazilian province, so they had this chip on their shoulder about their older, bigger next door neighbour. SPEAKER_04: The whole thing of being Uruguayan, going against the odds, fighting against an old colonial power. It spurred them on. SPEAKER_10: Meanwhile, the whole of Rio is now thinking about just one thing, the World Cup final. SPEAKER_11: There really is mass hysteria about it. Everybody knows about it. Everyone's engaged with it. Everyone wants to go. No one can talk or think about anything else. SPEAKER_07: In Brazil, people like to say that if everybody who claimed to have been in the stadium that afternoon was actually there, the stadium would have needed to be the size of the moon. And it was a big crowd. SPEAKER_10: Some estimate that there were 250,000 screaming fans packed into this flying saucer stadium, which is something like 80,000 people over capacity. SPEAKER_07: And the players, when they walked out, were just hit with this wall of noise. SPEAKER_11: The place is noisy, it is raucous. SPEAKER_10: But in the first half, neither team scores. SPEAKER_04: So the crowd was getting nervous. Everybody was getting tense. SPEAKER_10: Then finally, Brazil scores a goal. SPEAKER_07: Just after half time, a low shot across the goalkeeper into the bottom corner of the net. And there's just this relief that surges all around the crowd. Even the journalists run on and embrace the players. SPEAKER_10: Because basically everyone there thinks the game is all over, that Brazil has won the World Cup. SPEAKER_07: But then Uruguay scores. About halfway through the second half. SPEAKER_04: The description by whoever was there is that the stadium felt very, very nervous. And this nervousness went to the players, almost like they were losing the game. And then comes the moments that everybody will always narrate. SPEAKER_07: Alcides Chija, one of the Uruguayan wingers, gets the ball and dribbles down the right side toward the goal. And just as he's looking up to pass the ball, he notices that the goalkeeper, Barbosa, was SPEAKER_04: actually walking to try to anticipate a cross. SPEAKER_10: Which meant Barbosa was out of position. So instead of passing the ball, Chija shoots. And scores. SPEAKER_11: All of the reports talk about the most extraordinary silence in the stadium. SPEAKER_04: Alcides Chija once said in his book, only three people in the history of the Americana silence that crowd. Frank Sinatra, Pope John Paul II, and me. It's almost like a graveyard. Some of the players don't even remember what happened. It was a state of catatonia or something like that. SPEAKER_10: As you have probably guessed by now, Brazil does not manage to get another goal to tie the game. And Uruguay wins. As the game ends, the fans stream out of the stadium and back onto the streets of Rio. SPEAKER_04: It's almost like some kind of apocalypse happened and people just went somewhere else. There was this feeling of solitude, this feeling of numbness. And Rio de Janeiro wasn't a party city on that night, on the night of July 16, 1950. SPEAKER_11: There was a lot of public crying. There's a lot of hyperbole. SPEAKER_07: One Brazilian playwright calls the defeat Brazil's Hiroshima. All right, well that's just ridiculous. SPEAKER_11: Which I think is both in bad taste and an exaggeration. But people were really blown away. SPEAKER_07: The recriminations came thick and fast. And soon racist accusations started to fly. Barbosa, the guy who played goalkeeper for the Brazilians, was black. He and two other black players on the team were scapegoated in the popular press. And Barbosa was even hassled on the street. SPEAKER_11: His life was made difficult. There's a tragic story he tells later in life of hearing a woman whispering to a child, this is the man who made all of Brazil cry. SPEAKER_07: After that, the Brazilian team didn't pick another black goalkeeper to start in the World Cup for over 50 years. And this wasn't a coincidence. After that game, black goalkeepers were regarded as less reliable than white ones in Brazil. Which is disgusting. SPEAKER_10: But Barbosa wasn't the only focus of Brazilian blame. In fact, everything about Brazilian soccer was scrutinized down to the uniforms the players were wearing. SPEAKER_04: The authorities thought that the white shirt was cursed. And I think everybody else in Brazil did. SPEAKER_11: And above all, there was a determination never to play in white shirts again. SPEAKER_10: It was pretty unusual for a team to completely transform their uniform. Most countries have played in the same colors since the first World Cup back in the early 20th century. But the Brazilians decided their uniform was a problem. So in 1953, the Brazilian soccer authorities set up a competition and advertised it in a national newspaper that's distributed all over Brazil. They wanted people to write in with their designs for a new uniform. SPEAKER_07: The contest had only one stipulation. The color of the uniform had to include all the colors of the Brazilian flag. SPEAKER_10: Green, blue, white and yellow. A design that would truly represent Brazil. SPEAKER_07: Hundreds of people entered the contest. Including this guy. SPEAKER_13: My name is Aldir Garcia-Slez. SPEAKER_12: And I'm from Jaguaron on the board with Uruguay. SPEAKER_07: Aldir Garcia-Slez. He was just 19 when he entered the competition. A young man who had grown up in a little town right on the border between Brazil and Uruguay. Slez wasn't a designer. He was working at a local newspaper as an illustrator. He says when he first heard about the competition, he thought it would be too difficult. SPEAKER_12: The first impression I had was that this was foolish. That was ridiculous. Because it's rare to have a team with four colors. SPEAKER_10: Working four colors into just the shirt would have been hard. But eventually Slez realized he could use the whole uniform to spread out the colors. SPEAKER_07: He tried blue shorts with a green shirt. A yellow and green striped shirt with white shorts. A green and yellow striped shirt with blue shorts. He came up with over 200 different designs. Until eventually he had it. SPEAKER_10: Blue shorts, white socks, and a yellow shirt with green trim around the neck and the sleeves. He sent the design off and a few weeks later he looked down at the newspaper and saw his design staring back at him. He had won. SPEAKER_12: After that it was just a party. My feet didn't touch the ground and I was celebrating in the newsroom where I worked. It was like something impossible had just happened. SPEAKER_07: After he won, Slez got to bask in the glory of it all for a while. He went to Rio, did an internship with the newspaper that had sponsored the contest. He even lived with the Brazilian players for a few months. But eventually he returned to his small town and kind of forgot about the shirt for a while. But pretty soon the shirt was Brazil. In 1962 the Brazilians won the World Cup in Chile and they were wearing Slez's uniform. SPEAKER_10: Players like Pele wore the yellow shirt and dazzled the world with their extraordinary skill and beauty. Then color TV comes along and the whole world can watch Brazil in brand new technicolor like in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. SPEAKER_11: I was five when the 1970 World Cup was played and I saw Brazil win the 70 World Cup in shimmering yellow shirts. SPEAKER_07: Here's soccer historian David Goldblatt again. SPEAKER_11: For me, there's a memory there that I think lots of people have, even if they didn't see it, of dazzle, of brilliance, of amazing sort of global south sunshine, of flair. SPEAKER_07: Where Brazil had failed in 1950, the following years saw success after success. They won World Cup after World Cup, their yellow shirts becoming as much a hallmark as their intricate footwork and dazzling play. Slez's design became iconic, a symbol of Brazil, full of sun and life. SPEAKER_10: But for Slez, life wasn't quite living up to the image of Brazil he had created. He started working as a writer and academic. And in 1964, a brutal US-backed military dictatorship took power in a coup. SPEAKER_07: The new military government cracked down on people it considered to be subversive, including academics. Like a lot of other professors and students, Slez was arrested for basically being on the political left. When he got out of jail, he was expelled from his teaching job and was banned from leaving the country. Yeah, I was traumatized. SPEAKER_12: My wife and my children, we suffered a lot. SPEAKER_10: The dictatorship lasted for about 20 years, but despite the difficulties of living under the watchful eye of the military police, Slez became a successful writer and he developed an academic specialty. SPEAKER_07: Slez spent his life writing about the border between Brazil and Uruguay. SPEAKER_12: I am a citizen who has a heart and a body divided between Brazil and Uruguay. SPEAKER_07: Slez was technically born in Brazil, but less than a mile from the border with Uruguay. In fact, when he was a kid, his father helped build a bridge across the river that separates Uruguay from Brazil. SPEAKER_12: I am from the era when the bridge was built. My father went to help build the bridge, so I always been very connected to Uruguay. SPEAKER_07: Slez's experience growing up between two countries and his experiences under military rule have helped shape his feelings about Brazilian nationalism. Even though he designed a shirt that could be considered more patriotic than the Brazilian flag, he's actually very wary of patriotism. SPEAKER_13: It is an idea that competes with the ones that I have to live without limits, live without SPEAKER_12: borders. SPEAKER_10: Slez may not be a Brazilian patriot, but the soccer fan in him can't help but be proud of the Brazilian team. SPEAKER_12: Brazil won the championship five times. This is a source of pride. It's an honor for all of us. SPEAKER_10: But Slez has a secret, or at least something he never used to share with people who knew he was the designer of the famous yellow shirt. SPEAKER_07: Slez roots for Uruguay. For many in Brazil, this is blasphemy, but not for him. SPEAKER_12: We are one people, one border community. 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Okay, so I'm here with producer Emmet Fitzgerald who is going to give us an update on the state of the Brazilian soccer jersey and what's happened since 2017. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, a lot has happened to the Brazil soccer jersey since we first aired that episode. SPEAKER_10: It was really interesting to me listening back to the story that the designer of the jersey, Schley, was someone who was really wary of nationalism, especially given what has just happened in Brazil on January 8th. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and just to recap, on January 8th, thousands of far-right nationalists descended on the capital city of Brasilia to protest the inauguration of Lula, Brazil's new president. SPEAKER_01: Chaos in Brazil as thousands stormed the country's capital protesting October's election and results. SPEAKER_05: Supporters of far-right former... SPEAKER_09: The mob attacked Congress, the Supreme Court, and the palace of the president. SPEAKER_10: And it all just felt really eerily similar to what happened two years ago in the United States on January 6th, like a full-on insurrection by right-wing extremists questioning the results of the legitimate presidential election. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, totally. It felt, it felt disturbingly familiar from an American perspective. But if you look at videos or images from the Brazilian insurrection, you can't help but notice what the rioters are wearing. SPEAKER_00: The rioters, many dressed in green and yellow, the colors of the Brazilian flag, smashed windows, ransacked offices, even set fire to a carpet inside... SPEAKER_10: Yes, so many of them are wearing the yellow jersey of the national soccer team. It isn't just the colors of the flag, like it's the actual soccer team jersey. And I mean, watching these videos, it feels like the jersey has fully become a symbol of the far right, which is a pretty different situation from what we described in the original piece. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, so in the episode that we just played, you heard from Brazilian soccer journalist Fernando Duarte. And Fernando describes the Brazilian soccer jersey as this great unifier. For better or worse, it was the symbol of this beautiful game that united what had long been a deeply unequal and divided country. SPEAKER_10: So what happened to the shirt? Like, how did it get from there to here? Well, I think we got to start with the 2018 presidential election. SPEAKER_09: Right, what happened after the 2018 presidential election is that one side of the political SPEAKER_04: spectrum claimed the shirt. SPEAKER_09: This is Fernando Duarte again, and he says that after that election, the far right really latched on to the shirt as their own political symbol. It became a symbol of whoever supported the far right president, Jair Bolsonaro. SPEAKER_05: He's known as Brazil's Donald Trump, an anti-establishment politician who promises to drain the swamp and crack down on crime. SPEAKER_09: This is CNN coverage from election night in 2018 when Jair Bolsonaro was elected. And if you look in videos of crowds on that election night, you'll see a lot of Brazilian flags and you will see a lot of people wearing the colors of the Brazilian flag, yellow and green. SPEAKER_04: Wearing national symbols, national colors, yellow and green became something of a badge of identification of the president's supporters. And obviously, what is more yellow and green? What is more representative of Brazil as a nation than the national team shirt? SPEAKER_09: Now I want to be really clear that the roots of this connection between the Jersey and the far right go back before Bolsonaro. In the 60s and 70s and 80s, the military dictatorship in Brazil used the success of the national team wearing those yellow jerseys on the pitch to cultivate a sense of nationalism and support for the regime. And even more recently, the far right adopted the yellow and green during the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff in 2016. But when Bolsonaro gets into power, this whole thing really escalates in part because he starts to wear the jersey himself. Intentionally, it wasn't an accident, the president intentionally simulated wearing SPEAKER_04: the national team shirt as a sign of true patriotism, of true love to the nation. And obviously love to the nation in the small print was basically support for his agenda. SPEAKER_09: And as you can imagine, this created a real dilemma for a lot of soccer fans in Brazil who were used to wearing that jersey. SPEAKER_08: I always joke that I look great in yellow as well. So it was always something that I enjoyed doing. SPEAKER_09: This is Julia Bellas-Trindaji. She's a sports journalist from Brazil who's currently getting a PhD in the UK. She says that growing up, she always wore the yellow shirt, especially during World Cups. But she stopped during the Bolsonaro presidency because she didn't want to send the wrong signals. SPEAKER_08: For me, it was kind of, OK, I don't want to be seen as something that I'm not. I don't want to be seen as Bolsonaro. SPEAKER_10: I mean, not to take the Trump analogy too much further, but it feels like a kind of like the red hat thing. Like there's a piece of clothing that for all intents and purposes is pretty neutral, immediately became an identifier of your political beliefs. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I think it's I think it is a lot like that, except, you know, instead of a sort of random piece of clothing like a red hat, it's like the most famous and beloved piece of clothing in the country. Totally. And I think for the past four years, for a lot of Brazilians, it's felt as though this famous yellow jersey has been symbolically hijacked by the far right. SPEAKER_09: But there were two events this past year that really started to turn things around. And the first was that Bolsonaro lost the presidential election to Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as just Lula. He was the former president of Brazil and a champion of the Brazilian left, the Brazilian labor movement. And when he wins, Lula immediately makes a point of trying to reclaim the jersey. SPEAKER_08: He posted a lot of pictures wearing the jersey after the election, like whenever Brazil would play, he would post pictures of him wearing the jersey. SPEAKER_09: Just after the election, Lula was quoted saying, we can't be ashamed of wearing our green and yellow shirt. It doesn't belong to one particular candidate. It doesn't belong to one particular party. Green and yellow are the colors of 213 million citizens who love this country. SPEAKER_10: So this reclamation is like overt. It isn't like subtle at all. Like he's really speaking to the issue. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it was this really intentional effort to sort of neutralize the jersey, to make it for everyone again. And it was all happening in advance of event number two, which is the World Cup. Right. SPEAKER_10: So we just had the World Cup. Congrats to our Argentinian colleague, Martín, who was very invested in the series. Yes, yes. Congrats, Martín. SPEAKER_09: And, you know, Argentina's great rivals, Brazil, ended up bowing out pretty early with a disappointing loss to Croatia. But in the early stages of the tournament, they really were performing very well. SPEAKER_09: And you know, going into the tournament, a lot of people on the left had kind of abandoned the national team, in part because of the associations with the jersey, but also because a lot of the players were big Bolsonaro supporters, particularly the star Neymar. But during those early games, President-elect Lula was very publicly watching and cheering the team on. SPEAKER_08: He was celebrating. He was posting videos, watching the game, celebrating the goals, always with the jersey, even if the people who were watching with him wearing suits and, you know, politicians, he always feels like he has to show he is a man of the people. And a man of the people in Brazil watches football and supports the national team. Right. SPEAKER_10: You can't be a man of the people in Brazil and not support the national team. So how well did this work, this sort of intentional reclamation? Did Brazilian soccer fans start embracing the jersey again without, you know, necessarily signaling their, you know, their political leanings? SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I think for a while there was a feeling like it was working. You know, the timing of Lula's election with Brazil's play at the World Cup, it gave this feeling of a sort of symbolic reset during those early games when Brazil was destroying teams like South Korea and, you know, doing their Samba dances after every goal in the yellow jersey. A lot of people got excited and felt sort of like things were back to normal, including Fernando. The Korean game I was watching, I got so excited. SPEAKER_04: I bought a new shirt. You did? Yeah. I don't know. I just got really excited. I said, well, maybe it's time to buy a shirt again. Maybe when I go running, I'm going to wear it again. It was as a football fan. I was really, really, really enchanted by the brand of football that they played. And it's the shirt of my country. I think I'm entitled to wear it as a Brazilian. SPEAKER_09: So this interview that I did with Fernando happened while the World Cup was still going on. And I think at that point, he and a lot of people were feeling cautiously optimistic, you know, about the team, about the country, about the jersey. It felt like for the first time in a while, he could maybe wear a yellow jersey out in the world when he goes for his run and not feel like that was going to identify him as a Bolsonaro supporter. And you know, that was kind of the note that we were originally going to end this update on. Yeah, yeah. SPEAKER_10: And then, you know, right around that time we were wrapping up this, the January 8th riots happened. SPEAKER_09: Right. And obviously that's like a huge story that is way more important than the story of the jersey. And there's so many different angles that we're not going to get into. But for the purposes of this episode, I wanted to call Fernando back just to sort of check in with him and see how he was feeling about the jersey and about everything that was going on. SPEAKER_04: Well, what a difference a couple of weeks make, right? We thought that after the World Cup, there would be some reconciliation. No. I think that the situation is actually worse now than it was before the World Cup. SPEAKER_09: Fernando says that he certainly is not going to be wearing that new yellow jersey that he bought anytime soon. You know, it's going back in the closet. You know, I think a lot of people will refrain from being seen in any yellow shirt because SPEAKER_03: of what happened. SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I guess that makes sense. SPEAKER_09: I asked Fernando what he thought was going to happen next with the jersey. And I mean, I honestly was pretty surprised by his answer. I mean, first of all, he doesn't know. He has no idea what's going to happen. But he says it's conceivable that the country could abandon the yellow jersey. SPEAKER_03: Maybe this is the point where we depart from the yellow one. SPEAKER_04: I think it's difficult to say now. Oh, yes, definitely. Something's going to change. But clearly something has to happen in regards to this association with the far right. SPEAKER_10: Whoa. I mean, is that something that you think could actually happen? SPEAKER_09: Well, I mean, even before the World Cup, there was some talk of turning away from the yellow jersey from people on the left who felt that it was just too far gone as a symbol. That movement always felt like a long shot. But now, after January 8th, Fernando is not so sure. It's not totally ridiculous to think that they might change the color of the shirt. SPEAKER_03: There are rumors in Brazil that the Brazilian Football Confederation and Nike are to discuss what to do because clearly the product is tarnished, right? SPEAKER_04: Imagine if you're Nike, you're paying gazillions of dollars for the right to produce something that now has got a bad reputation. SPEAKER_10: Hmm. Well, a bad reputation for some. It's really fascinating. I mean, if they were to move away from the yellow jersey, isn't that just kind of like letting one side win this debate? It just feels like a sad outcome. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Yeah. I get that. I feel kind of similarly, I think. And I think Fernando feels that way, too. Honestly, he seemed pretty unsure of what he thinks should happen next. And I get it. I mean, I think if you're a Brazilian soccer fan who doesn't support Bolsonaro or who certainly doesn't support the insurrection, I don't know if there's a great solution here. So if they were to change the jersey, what do you think they would change it to? SPEAKER_09: Well, there are a few options. Brazil has an alternate blue kit that they've been wearing for years. It looks pretty nice. And then they could always go back to white. SPEAKER_04: You know what? White is the color of peace. And it's a New Year's tradition in Brazil to wear white underwear or white clothes if you want peace in the New Year. So maybe this is a way to kind of like wish for something different. SPEAKER_10: Wow. That would really bring it all full circle. Yeah. SPEAKER_09: I mean, I don't know how likely that is, given the history. I mean, I think, you know, if I had to say, I think the most likely outcome is probably that the yellow jersey continues and people just keep fighting about what it means. But there's really no doubt that that real damage has been done to the jersey as this symbol of Brazilian unity. You have to watch the space. SPEAKER_04: But clearly something something happened. And, you know, the the the perception of that shirt worldwide has been tarnished somehow. That is undeniable. SPEAKER_10: Well thank you for that update, Emmet. And it's been really fascinating to hear from Fernando again and all the people that are affected by this. So I appreciate it. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. SPEAKER_05: Thank you, Roman. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Joe Sykes and Emmet Fitzgerald, mixed by Shrif SPEAKER_10: Yousif and Martine Gonzalez, music by Suan Rial and Melodium, English voiceover by Ne Araujo. We'd like to thank Alex Bellos for his help. Alex was the first English journalist to write about this story and helped point us in the right direction. Junior Mazza and Fabio Aranalde also fixed everything up for us in Brazil and translated our interview with Shlei. The rest of the 99PI team includes senior editor Jelani Hall, digital director Kurt Kolstad, Vivien Le, Christopher Johnson, Chris Berube, Lajimodan, Jason De Leon, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Sofia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building and beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. And now TikTok, our first TikTok video story produced by the insanely talented Talyn Stradley premiered today. Please check it out. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI dot org. SPEAKER_06: We see the potential in Kelly Twitchell, co-founder of Access Tracks. 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