‘BOXING CHANGED EVERYTHING’

I HAD a difficult childhood, like so many in Brazil. To give you an idea, I lived in a house that was 35 square feet and I was sleeping in a room where five other people slept. There was no bathroom and that is how I lived until I was 23 years old.

My nickname ‘Popo’ means ‘milking’ where I’m from. At the age of five I was still milking from my mother’s breast. That’s where my nickname came from, I was given it as a child.

Up until I was 12, I didn’t give the small house I lived in a second thought. It was all normal to me, there was nothing else to compare it to. But once I became a teenager, and I was starting to get older and bigger, I remember being hungry, so hungry, and I started to wonder why there was no food for