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 Americas & Beyond | April 2008 
Cheerleading Surging in Latin America
 Casey Woods - Miami Herald
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| | Members of the Colombian cheerleading team, the Ducks All-Stars, work on their routine at Top Gun, a local gym in Miami. (Marice Cohn Band/Miami Herald) | | |
The group of young women from Colombia's Ducks All-Stars cheerleading team huddled at the edge of the gym floor. They anxiously tugged on their crimson bows, tested the depth of their splits and spit out their gum as they braced to follow the toughest act: Miami's Top Gun elite team, reigning champions in the fiercely competitive world of cheerleading.
The performances were only a practice run at Top Gun's Kendall gym ahead of this weekend's Cheerleading and Dance Worlds championships. But to the Colombian team that traveled to Florida from Bogotá, the pressure felt intense.
"My God," Ducks cheerleader Maria Alejandra Rosas, 20, gasped at a particularly dazzling set of backflips by two buff Top Gun teenagers.
Cheerleading, once the most American of sports, has now found fertile ground in the Americas as a sport in its own right.
The Ducks, a coed team that includes 10 young men, will be among 900 cheerleaders from 36 Latin American teams at Disney's Wide World of Sports complex in Orlando for the Worlds. The premier event in the competitive cheering realm will include 100,000 cheerleaders on 90 teams from more than 30 countries, including China, Ukraine, Australia, Croatia and South Korea.
Officials of the U.S. All-Star Federation, or USASF, estimate that there are 500,000 U.S. cheerleaders who belong to "all star" gyms and another 200,000 cheerleaders abroad _ about a third of them in Latin America.
"It's almost like it's catching fire, and after getting big in Mexico it's just moving down . . . into the rest of Latin America," said USASF chairman Jim Chadwick, chairman of both the U.S. and international federations.
Each weekend in Bogotá, the Ducks' hometown, at least 300 athletes gather in the leafy field outside a public gym to practice pyramids, tumbling runs and dance routines. Many dream of representing Colombia in the Worlds.
Cheerleading arrived in the South American nation in the early 1990s and slowly grew as an extracurricular activity in many high schools. It has exploded in popularity in the last five years, fueled by ESPN's competition coverage and YouTube videos of the top U.S. teams, which foreign teams study obsessively.
A television station in Colombia now has a half-hour weekly program called Cheer Zone that covers local teams and competitions.
Despite the rising popularity, cheerleading teams struggle to get sponsors for their events, and investors are hesitant to finance a new sport.
The Ducks _ called Los Patos in their native Colombia _ get a half-hour each week in a Bogotá municipal gym with the proper padded spring floor that cheerleaders need for their tumbling runs. The rest of the time they practice on grass.
"Cheerleading is really going to explode when someone has the money to create a place for it," Ducks member Ricardo Rueda, 19, said as he took a break from practicing backflips.
Rueda began cheerleading in high school, after a teacher required him to make up for a folkloric dance class he flunked. His mother is supportive, but some of his friends thought "it was kind of weird."
"Many people still think cheerleading is still a bunch of girls with pom-poms," Rueda said.
His high school team, the Vikings, was among the first three international teams to go to the Worlds in 2005. As he watched U.S. outfits such as Top Gun, he realized the real possibilities in the sport, which is called porrismo in Spanish.
"Our performance was a wipeout, but it totally changed our way of looking at it," said Rueda, who is now preparing to become a certified cheerleading coach.
Some Latin American companies that run cheerleading events are attempting to build a regional following by sending teams to each others' events, but they often lack consistent cheerleading rules in their countries. The regulatory Babel sometimes requires a team to follow one set of rules for local competitions, another for nationals, and yet another for Worlds.
"Everyone mixes things up down here and changes them around because there are no official organizations," said Assaf Duran, of the Olympic Cheerleading Confederation, or COP in Spanish, one of Mexico's leading cheerleading event production companies.
"We have to use well-known judges from the U.S., or no one would believe in the quality of our events," he said.
At COP's annual national championship _ which has drawn teams from Colombia, Guatemala and Costa Rica _ cheerleaders compete on an open-air beachfront stage in a finale accompanied by fireworks.
"We want it to be like a Disney World for cheerleaders," Duran said.
COP also has an Internet-based cheerleading "television channel." The company planned a reality show that would follow a Mexican team through the lead-up and competition at the Worlds, but the plans were scuttled when many cheerleaders were denied U.S. visas.
The USASF created international divisions two years ago to accommodate the realities of the foreign cheerleaders, many of whom are older and don't qualify for the under-18 U.S. categories.
The different divisions mean the Ducks will not compete against Top Gun's elite team, which has mostly high-school age members.
As the Ducks stared slack-jawed at Top Gun's near-flawless practice, the Colombians seemed relieved the U.S cheerleaders were not their direct competition.
cwoods(at)MiamiHerald.com |
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