Pressure as an advantage
With the medal on his chest, Lucas Pinheiro manages to live up to the great expectations that were placed on him before the Games. The athlete arrived in Milan-Cortina to defend Brazil for the first time at the Olympics, and as one of the candidates for the podium — he arrived second in the world rankings in the giant slalom and with three silver medals in World Cup stages this season.
The pressure that I bring to these Games is something that I try to embrace with gratitude, because if I didn’t deal with that pressure, I wouldn’t be able to demonstrate anything different. At the end of the day, if I wasn’t here to make a difference, why would I be here then? Instead of having this relationship with pressure as something that could bother me, my goal is to use it to my advantage Lucas, in a press conference on the 7th
Born in Oslo, Norway, the skier is the son of Bjorn Braathen and Brazilian Alessandra Pinheiro de Castro. “It sounds like a script from classic romantic comedy films, but it’s real. My father came to Brazil on a trip in the 1990s and exchanged glances with my mother Alessandra at the airport in São Paulo. The two boarded the same flight to Miami, in the United States, and, believe it or not, they sat side by side (…) The passion was overwhelming, and my mother moved to Norway to experience this love with my father”, he told UOL, in 2024.
He decided to defend the green and yellow in 2024, after having even indicated the end of his career. “[Lucas] He was 23 years old and said that he had lost the pleasure of competing, that the Norwegian confederation was not treating him in the way he thought was appropriate. Afterwards, he came to us and talked about his interest in competing again. We were following his career. His mother is from Campinas, but, at the time, he did not have a Brazilian passport. He submitted the paperwork, got it done and we started the process for him to defend Brazil”, said Anders Pettersson, president of the Brazilian Snow Sports Confederation (CBDN), to UOL, in January.
date:2026-02-14 18:14:00
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