Capoeira Scored Like Savate, One Announced Touch at a Time

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Capoeira's sportification is treated as a purely Brazilian affair. The thesis draws a precise parallel with French savate — the announced touch, the halted exchange — situating capoeira within a wider history of combat sportification.

The announced touch

The regulation of the early capoeiragem championships is not without recalling the first savate competitions, which supposed the absence of continuity in the exchanges: they unfolded at the announced touch, the assault halted at each point marked. The game was cut into discrete scored moments — a logic foreign to the continuous flow of the roda.

From gymnastics to national wrestling

If the word 'wrestling' had supplanted the word 'gymnastics', the adjective 'national' was now definitively associated with competitive capoeiragem. Within these championships in the capital, it was no longer a practice at the margins of the civilised world but an object representative of brasilidade — and, redefined thus, it exported itself beyond the country's borders.

Why it matters

To score capoeira at the announced touch was to borrow the grammar of another combat sport. Its sportification is not a local curiosity but part of a shared history of making games measurable.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (Part I: the parallel with early savate; the announced touch; Correio da Manhã, 1913)

IN THE CORPUS

→ The State That Forced Capoeira to Become a Sport

→ The Crowd Wanted Real Fights, Not Ballets

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Capoeira Scored Like Savate, One Announced Touch at a Time. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 104. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/capoeira-scored-like-savate-one-announced-touch-at-a-time. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.