Lays Silva

Happy birthday to Brazil’s sprint hurdler Lays Silva, who won a South American title in the age group ABOVE hers before she won one in her own.

That is not a mistake in the order. In 2022, at eighteen, Lays won the **South American U23** 100m hurdles title at Cascavel. The following May she went to Colombia and won the **South American U20** title in 13.76, beating Chile’s Chia Lai Ruan and Argentina’s Helen Bernard Stilling, who turned twenty-one in this magazine five days ago. Most athletes work upward through the categories. Lays took the older one first.

Three months after Colombia she was in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, taking bronze at the Pan American U20 Championships in 13.94, behind an American and a Jamaican. Her own assessment afterwards was clear-eyed and entirely earned: she was the third-best athlete in the Americas, and she was standing alongside the best in the world in her category. She is a two-time Brazilian U20 champion and a two-time Brazilian U23 champion, and last August she won her first medal at the Troféu Brasil, the biggest interclub competition in Latin American athletics. Her personal best over the 100m hurdles is 13.35.

She has done all of it from Joinville, in Santa Catarina, for the same club: Associação Corville de Atletismo, voted the best athletics team in the state. She competes on a university athlete scholarship at UniSociesc rather than for one of the big corporate programmes in São Paulo. The local press has one word for her, and it is a good one: a joinvilense. The girl from Joinville.

Parabéns, Lays, e muitos anos de vida! Que hoje tenha bolo, brigadeiro e um rá-tim-bum bem alto. Arrasou! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇧🇷