Duda, Ana Patricia bring home long-awaited Olympic gold to Brazil

There was only one element missing from Duda Lisboa’s resume.

She’d won a World Championship. Won a Gstaad cowbell. Won every accolade there was to win — Rookie, Server, Most Outstanding, Best Team. All of them.

Even when she was just a teenager, playing in an era that included prime April Ross and just-out-of-her-prime Laura Ludwig, she was voted by her peers at the best player in the world, in both 2018 and 2019 and again in 2023.

Yet she hadn’t won an Olympic gold.

No Brazilian female, in fact, had claimed an Olympic gold medal since Sandra Piles and Jackie Silva did so in 1996, winning an all-Brazilian final.

Duda wasn’t even born.

It is fitting, then, that the first Brazilian Olympic gold medal of her lifetime has been won by her and Ana Patricia Silva, beating Canadians Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson on Friday evening in Paris, 26-24, 12-21, 15-9.

Only Ana Patricia, Duda’s best friend and longtime partner, has been able to match the torrid pace of the 26-year-old Brazilian defender. When they were kids, they were world-beaters. If there was a tournament to win, they won it. Won the youth Olympics exactly 10 years ago in Nanjing, China. Won the Under 21 World Championships two years after that. And again the year after that.

They split for an Olympic quad, Duda turning to one of the best to ever play the game in Agatha Bednarczuk, Ana Patricia to Rebecca Cavalcanti. They both qualified for the Tokyo Games but, in spite of winning a combined 25 medals in the process, neither made the podium in the Olympics.

For a stretch, it seemed Paris may have portended a similar outcome.

They were the most decorated team of the three-year stretch between the Games, winning nine golds, including the 2022 World Championships in Rome. Yet 2024 provided an uncharacteristic lapse in medals. Since partnering back up in 2022, they hadn’t gone a stretch of three tournaments without a podium a single time — until the three events leading into Paris, which featured a fifth in Espinho, fourth in Ostrava, ninth in Gstaad. That ninth was their worst finish in a tournament in two years, dating back to the 2022 Ostrava Elite16.

Perhaps that’s what ignited their dominant run through Paris. Perhaps it was a simple regression to the mean. In any event, what happened next was vintage Duda and Ana Patricia: five straight sweeps to earn a berth into the medal rounds. An excellent three-set semifinal win over…