Word: valee
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Vanessa Porto made her name in one of the most watched videos on Brazilian sports websites. There, Porto, 23, took on an opponent named Cristiane Cyborg, a woman much bigger and heavier than her in Vale Tudo, the pastime North Americans call Ultimate Fighting. Porto did not win that fight but she stood her ground and ended the match on her feet, becoming a legend by aggressively going the distance. Now, Ultimate Fighting is Porto's career and she one of a handful of women who are rising stars in the controversial male-dominated sport...
Porto is still a little queasy about what she is able to do. She ended a match with a woman in her own weight class with a chokehold that left the opponent in convulsions. , "I was a little worried about what I had done," she confesses. But, "in Vale Tudo, it's everyone for themselves. If it hadn't been her, it would have been me on the floor...
...Brazil, it was the Cyborg match in November 2005 that was the defining moment in Porto's career. "Nobody could understand how Vanessa, who is much lighter, just kept going for round after round, and not only resisting but fighting back with great aggression," said Mauricio Costa, a Vale Tudo promoter who runs the B-Tough Agency in Rio de Janeiro, a world center of the sport...
...July 14, she will make her international debut in Los Angeles at the Fatal Femmes Fighting championship, where she will square off against other women competitors from around the world. Nevertheless, she is growing tired of her female opponents. She has offered to take on the best male Vale Tudo fighter in the country. "The rules won't permit it, of course," said Costa, adding that women have been involved in Vale Tudo since about 2003. "But she's totally serious about taking...
...Vale Tudo, which translates as "anything goes" in Portuguese, originated among jiu-jitsu masters in Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana neighborhood, which has the largest concentration of jiu-jitsu academies in the world. Often called "cage fighting" or Ultimate Fighting in North America, fighters use a mixture of several different kinds of martial arts styles to force their opponent to "tap out" or give up. In Rio de Janeiro, matches became so brutal that fighters were often rushed to the hospital after their matches. There is now a 30-page rule book ("no hair-pulling, no eye-gouging, no biting...