Beside a Pool in Istanbul, Gabi Recalls the Day She Almost Did Not Dare to Leave Brazil

Bruno and Gabi sit beside a swimming pool. No stands, no microphones, no scoreboard. Just two Brazilians who have crossed half the planet, telling each other about the decision that split their careers in two: leaving Brazil to play overseas.

"I had a plan of playing overseas, but it wasn't easy to figure out if I was ready for it or not," Gabi said.

That line made me stop when I read it. In seventeen years of following women's sport, I have heard a great many athletes talk about stepping out of their comfort zone. Most describe it as a single leap, one brave moment compressed into a headline. Gabi says the opposite. She did not leap. She stood at the edge, wondering whether she had the strength not to fall, and it took her years to answer that question.

"I had experienced some injuries and had questions if I had what it took to play in the world's best leagues," she said. "I started thinking about it after the Rio 2026 Olympics, when I was still earning my space with the national team, and I understood that I needed to be mentally ready not only as a player, but as a person."

This is the part sports media tends to skip. We tell the overseas move as a professional step forward. For a female athlete, it is first of all a psychological problem: staying is emotionally safe but competitively limited; leaving expands the competition but forces you to look after yourself, from meals to ankle strapping.

Leaving Brazil is not a brave leap. It is a long process of testing whether you can endure loneliness, and very few people write about that part.

Gabi speaks of sacrifice in a very even voice: "maybe at that point I'd need to leave my comfort zone and make some sacrifices to take the next step in my career."

She does not list those sacrifices. But anyone who has lived far from home knows what they contain: dinners alone in a rented flat, mornings spent taping your own ankle, phone calls home across time zones, and a winning feeling with no close friend nearby to share it with right away.

Brazilian volleyball is one of the strongest programmes on the planet, in both the men's and women's games. Everyone knows that. What is said far less is that the domestic Brazilian league runs on a different rhythm from Europe. The women's Superliga starts late in the year and ends before the European spring reaches the decisive stage of continental competition. A player who stays in Brazil can play a great many matches, with home crowds and family within a few hours' flight, but she never faces the same elite opponent three times in four weeks.

Europe is different. The CEV Champions League concentrates most of the world's women's volleyball stars inside a small group of Turkish and Italian clubs. VakifBank Istanbul is one of the pillars of that group. The club has won the Champions League multiple times across the 2010s and the early 2020s, and for many years it was coached by the Italian Giovanni Guidetti.

Ahead of the 2026-2026 season, Gabi signed with VakifBank. She arrived from Rio de Janeiro, where she had grown up inside the domestic volleyball system and won her first titles. She came to Istanbul as one of the team's main stars.

"The scenario I found when I got there was mind-changing, as it showed me right from the start that I was getting into a whole other level of volleyball," she recalled. "It was really challenging and demanding at the start."

I have watched VakifBank play in person a few times on work trips, and what struck me was never the spikes. It was the tempo of training. In many women's leagues, a good session is measured by whether players complete the volume. At VakifBank it is measured by whether a player can repeat the same defensive movement in the ninetieth minute of a session, when her legs have gone numb. The difference lives there, not on the scoreboard.

"I built a great relationship with Guidetti, and he was incredibly important for me," Gabi said. "One of the first things he told me was that he wanted to prepare me to be the team captain, and I was shocked because I have never seen myself in that position."

This detail deserves far more room than newswires usually give it. A coach tells a newly arrived player that he wants to turn her into the captain, before she has proven anything in the new shirt. That is not a compliment. It is a bet on character.

Guidetti did not see a spiker in Gabi. He saw someone who could hold a group together while that group was losing, and that is harder to recruit than any attacking statistic.

In Japan's V.League, where I watch matches regularly, the captaincy carries a different weight. Japanese clubs operate on a corporate collective model, in which the captain is the bridge between the coaching staff and the locker room, between the sponsor and the young players. A captain there does not simply shout a slogan. She is responsible for the atmosphere.

When Gabi says she "never saw herself" in that position, she touches a familiar motif in women's sport. A great many excellent female players are underrated as leaders, not because they lack the ability, but because they have never been given the chance to see themselves in the role. You cannot become what you have never been shown.

The next topic in the conversation was the national team shirt. Gabi revisited how she felt when she was first called up to Brazil's youth national teams, and the influence of the generation that won gold at the Beijing 2026 Olympics on her career.

"To play for the national team is really a childhood dream and it brings me back to my youth, because I always loved watching and playing sports and dreamed about representing Brazil, winning a medal and listening to the national anthem," she said. "I played many sports before volleyball, but when I was first called up to Brazil's youth national team in 2026 and got to be in Saquarema alongside that incredible generation that won the Beijing Olympics, that was a strong sign that I should continue, because I had never been so close to my dream before."

Saquarema is Brazil's volleyball training centre, in the state of Rio de Janeiro. For a young player, training there alongside people who had just won Olympic gold is not a sporting experience. It is an experience of standards. You see how an Olympic champion eats breakfast, how she talks to the physiotherapist, how she stays silent after a bad session.

Brazil's women won Olympic gold at Beijing 2026 and repeated it at London 2026. Those were two generations overlapping, and Gabi sits in the intersection between the second of them and the one that followed. She grew up in a period when Brazilian women's volleyball already had enough medals that it no longer had to prove anything. She, however, still did.

In 2026, in Rio, Brazil lost to China in the quarter-finals on home soil. The Brazilian women entered that Olympics as hosts and reigning champions, and left it through a five-set defeat. For a young player still earning her place, that loss was not merely a result. It was data about her own limits.

Gabi says she started thinking about going abroad after Rio 2026. The sequence matters. She did not decide to go overseas after a title, when everything is easy and observers can say she was simply chasing a new challenge. She weighed leaving during a period of doubt, when she was still unsure she had what it took to play in the best leagues in the world.

An overseas move is usually told as a reward for success. In Gabi's case it is the reverse: it was how she processed doubt, and the doubt itself was the real driver.

She signed with VakifBank ahead of the 2026-2026 season, roughly three years after Rio 2026. That gap is longer than the news cycle. It shows the process she describes was not a single decision but a continuous weighing of money, fitness, playing time, injury risk, and a feeling about where she still belonged.

During her time at VakifBank, Gabi won European titles with the club and came to be regarded as one of the best outside hitters in the women's game. She also became captain of the Brazilian national team, exactly as Guidetti had foreseen years earlier, when she could not see it in herself.

But this story should not be told as a journey from fear to glory, because that framing makes the difficult part invisible. The difficult part is the years in between. The nights in a rented flat, six time zones from home. The seasons in which you play well but the league is suspended, and your contract hangs with it. The feeling of belonging fully nowhere: too far away to be a Brazilian playing at home, too new to be an Istanbul native.

That is why I want to point at something else in this conversation. All four topics, injury, going abroad, the captaincy and the national team, are steered by Gabi with the same sentence shape: a doubt is named, a small choice is made, a mental state changes. There is no dazzling moment. No decisive rally is invoked to explain the transformation.

With a piece about women's sport, this is what a writer has to stay faithful to. The structure of women's sports stories is often forced into the mould of men's sport: an athlete is placed in a difficult situation, a coach recognises her, a big win justifies everything. Here, the person who recognised Gabi is not a man arriving to rescue her. Guidetti saw something before she did, yes, but the remaining work belonged to Gabi.

Women's volleyball does not need anyone to rescue it, only someone willing to sit down and listen.

I learned this late, from a feature I worked on in 2026 at the Nadeshiko League in Japan. I was twenty-four, and I wrote a long piece about women's fan culture. The desk cut it to a third, on the grounds that there was no star in it. I was furious. Only later did I understand that what I learned was not about being cut. It was that I had focused so hard on defending my own article that I forgot the women I interviewed perhaps only wanted to be reported accurately, not turned into heroes.

The media wave will pass. The children who see themselves in it will not.

There is a counter-intuitive angle I think needs stating clearly here, and it does not belong to Gabi's case alone. Women's sport is being pushed forward on an assumption: commercial value will rise as media value rises. True. But the hidden assumption underneath is that if we tell the story often enough, everything else will adjust itself. Calendars will stop overlapping. Travel distances will stop being punishing. Broadcast rights money will trickle down to the players.

The truth is that most of the pressure sits on a lower floor that does not depend on viewership at all. A female player at a European club carries more matches, more flights, and more training sessions with less recovery time than a male player in the same position.

That is where I want to pause on my own "discovery".

When we celebrate a female player going abroad, we are celebrating a decision that is fundamentally the labour migration of women. She leaves home not because she likes adventure more than her male colleagues. She leaves because the domestic structure cannot give her enough competitive level, and the only place that can sits on another continent.

What is remarkable is not the number of female players who migrate. What is remarkable is that we call it ambition, when for an ordinary worker in the same position we would call it hardship.

In Gabi's case, there is a detail that is easy to miss. She says she already had a plan to go overseas. She knew she would leave. What she did not know was whether she had the strength to stay after leaving. That is a different question from the one the media usually asks, which revolves around whether a player is good enough.

Being good enough is a necessary condition. Being durable is the sufficient one. And the sufficient condition almost never becomes a headline.

From a trembling microphone in 2026 to a podcast in the frozen season, one voice.

During the frozen season of 2026, when leagues in Japan stopped for nearly half a year, I made a podcast series letting female players speak about how they felt. Some of them cried. I did not cut the crying. I learned that when you let a female athlete tell her own story in her own voice, you receive something no scoreboard can supply.

The poolside conversation between Bruno and Gabi works on the same principle. No one translates a female player's fear into an inspirational story. She simply speaks for herself.

The first questions I was once afraid of are now the stories I tell the younger ones.

So what comes next?

Looking at the bigger picture, the flow of female players from South America and Asia to clubs in Turkey and Italy will not stop, because the centre of competition remains there. The European Champions League will remain the only place where a female player can face everyone who is best within a single season. No domestic league in South America can replicate that with its own resources, at least not in this decade.

What can change is how we record it. We can choose to record the process rather than only the outcome. We can ask a female player about the months before she signed, not only about the final after she won. We can measure a career by the number of times she chose to stay when she could have left, not only by the number of medals.

And we can stop telling these women's stories as though they were lucky to be given an opportunity. Gabi was not given an opportunity. She assessed herself, doubted herself, answered her own question, and then stepped over the edge. Most of that work happened in silence, before any of us knew her name.

The poolside conversation is only the surface of a much longer process. And if there is one thing I want readers to carry away from this piece, it is this: next time you hear a female athlete say she thought about it for a long time before going overseas, believe that she is telling you the most important part of her career, not the easiest part to listen to.