Sports
Football (soccer in the U.S. and Canada) is the most popular sport. The two most popular football teams are Esporte Clube Bahia and Esporte Clube Vitoria. In 2011, Bahia plays in the Brazilian Championship Serie A (first division/premier league), while Vitoria plays in the Brazilian Championship Serie B (second division). Bahia has won the two most important football national league: The Taça Brasil in 1959 and the Brazilian Championship Serie A (Campeonato Brasileiro) in 1988. Vitoria has never been a national champion but was runner up of the Brazilian Serie A in 1993.
In the sport of boxing, Bahian native Acelino "Popó" Freitas has been world champion (WBC) in the lightweight class. Other prominent fighters from this state are former heavyweight champion of both Pride Fighting Championship and Ultimate Fighting Championship Antônio Rodrigo Nogueira and his twin brother Antônio Rogério Nogueira.
Salvador is one of the host cities of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, for which Brazil is the host nation.
Read more about this topic: Bahia
Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“Come, my Celia, let us prove
While we may the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever,
He at length our good will sever.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
“In the end, I think you really only get as far as you’re allowed to get.”
—Gayle Gardner, U.S. sports reporter. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 87 (June 17, 1991)
“Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green;
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain;”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774)