Gabi on leaving Brazil: from Rio 2026 to VakifBank and the captain's armband

By a still swimming pool, two Brazilians sat talking with no stands behind them. Bruno Rezende and Gabriela Braga Guimarães. Their conversation opens exactly where most sports interviews stop: after the Rio 2026 Olympic Games.

Gabi says that was the moment she first began to consider playing overseas. She had been through injuries; she had questioned whether she had what it took to play in the world's best leagues. And she understood she needed to be mentally ready — as a player and as a person. That she might have to leave her comfort zone and accept certain sacrifices to keep moving forward in her career.

It sounds like a story about courage. Placed beside the summer of 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, it is a confession.

For Brazilian volleyball, Rio 2026 was two films running down the same street. Bruno Rezende's men reached the final, beat Italy 3-0 and won gold on home soil. Gabi's women were stopped in the quarterfinals by China, who went on to win the title. One city, one sport, two players who left that Olympics in states of mind that cannot be compared.

Bruno is not an outsider to this story. He too left Brazil to play in Italy; he too captained a national team scrutinised on every set. He knows that for a Brazilian player, the decision to go abroad is never purely professional. It is about language, about meals, about evenings in a rented apartment where nobody knows your name.

Gabi was 22 then. She was still earning her place in the starting six, still learning to live with recurring injuries. This is the quietest stretch in almost any athlete's career: no press conference is held for the question of whether you are good enough.

Three years later, ahead of the 2026-2026 season, she signed with VakifBank, one of the strongest clubs on the planet. The destination was not a comfortable one: Istanbul, the Turkish league, where the pressure to win every match is the default setting. Crowd memory is the thing sport rewrites each season, and it only takes one person who knows how to copy it down; at VakifBank, they copy very carefully.

Gabi describes the scenario she found there as mind-changing. Right from the start, she understood she had stepped into another level of volleyball. The beginning was challenging and demanding. But she built a strong relationship with head coach Giovanni Guidetti, who, in her words, was incredibly important to her in that period.

The most telling detail sits in one short sentence: one of the first things Guidetti told her was that he wanted to prepare her to become team captain. Gabi says she was shocked, because she had never seen herself in that position.

There is a mechanism worth naming here. A top coach does not buy an outside hitter; he buys a block of time, and he chooses to invest in the person inside the player before investing in the technique. Guidetti talked about the captain's armband with a player who had just arrived, before she had any standing in the dressing room. That is a bet on psychology, and it only works when the player believes it.

Based on my experience watching matches and open training sessions of volleyball teams across Europe and Southeast Asia, the biggest difference is not the volume of work. In many weeks, the leading European clubs train fewer hours than Asian sides. What they have extra is people who keep telling the player she is going to become somebody. Elsewhere, players are only reminded that they need to run one more lap.

The rest of the conversation turned to the national team shirt, and the theme pulled Gabi back to her first impressions when she was called up to Brazil's youth teams, and to the influence of the generation that won gold at Beijing 2026.

She says playing for the national team was a childhood dream, that it takes her back to her youth, when she loved watching and playing sport and dreamed of representing Brazil, winning a medal and hearing the national anthem. She played many sports before volleyball. But her first call-up to Brazil's youth national team came in 2026, when she was at Saquarema alongside the generation that had just won Beijing. She calls it a strong sign that she should continue, because she had never been so close to her dream.

The Saquarema detail matters more than it looks. Saquarema is the training centre of Brazilian volleyball, the place every generation passes through. In 2026, Gabi was 14. She was not technically coached by that golden generation. She was merely near them — the same corridor, the same dining room, the same timetable. But being near long enough teaches a young player something no training plan can: the daily rhythm of people who are good.

Every starting line is a Sunday nobody knows the name of. That afternoon in Saquarema in 2026 was recorded by no one and reported by no one. Yet it is the point of departure for a journey still running fifteen years later.

As an outside hitter, Gabi belongs to the shorter end of the world's top bracket. She does not win with height; she wins with reading, timing and handling balls at angles most of her peers never consider. That explains why the Turkish years meant so much to her: in a league where every point is treated with equal seriousness, a hitter who lives on intelligence is forced to upgrade that intelligence.

And there is an arc worth seeing. In 2026 she left Rio as a quarterfinal loser. In 2026 she arrived in Istanbul as a marquee signing. By Paris 2026 she was Brazil's captain, winning bronze with her teammates. The captain's armband Guidetti mentioned in those first days at VakifBank did appear in real life — just in a different place from the one he named.

But the story of leaving the comfort zone is usually told too beautifully, and that beauty hides the roughest part.

Brazil is one of the strongest volleyball nations on earth, yet its domestic league cannot match the salaries paid by clubs in Turkey, Italy or China. When Gabi speaks of sacrifice, the financial layer behind that sentence needs reading. A leading hitter at her peak can earn several times more abroad. For most Brazilian players, leaving is not an act of bravery; it is the only option. Calling it bravery quietly turns an economic condition into a personal quality.

The consequences do not stop with the individual. Every star who leaves costs the Superliga a ticket-selling name and a role model for the youngsters who stay. The national team, meanwhile, must assemble people from four or five different coaching systems, with four or five different understandings of volleyball, in very short windows before major tournaments. A national team stitched from scattered pieces is often hard to predict, but also hard to stabilise.

As for Guidetti saying he wanted to prepare Gabi to be captain: it can be read as kindness, and it can be read as asset management. A Brazil captain is a more valuable asset than an ordinary outside hitter, on the court and on the payroll, in Istanbul and in the transfer market. The two readings do not exclude each other, and that is precisely why both should be kept.

The conversation happened beside a pool, in a place with no spectators and no scoreboard. People come to the stadium to see who wins, then realise they are watching who becomes. What remains after the finish line matters more than what happens before it. For Gabi, the finish line was not any medal in Rio, but the moment she decided she would not stay.

One question left open: if Brazil's domestic league paid enough to keep its best at home, would Gabi have become a captain at VakifBank — and would Brazil's women have found a different kind of champion?