The Champion Who Refused to Fight a Black Man

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The first of May 1909 is the most celebrated date in the history of capoeira. It is also one of the least known: cited everywhere, it is almost never documented beyond its dénouement. The press archives make it possible to restore what the myth cut away — two entire trajectories, and a previously unpublished identification obtained by cross-referencing the sources.

The night the theatre nearly exploded

Rio de Janeiro, the Pavilhão Internacional theatre, evening of 1 May 1909. For several weeks, a Japanese jiu-jitsu instructor has been challenging the entire city. Five pounds in gold to whoever withstands his throws for three minutes. The press calls him Sada Myako. A Frenchman has tried. A Portuguese too. No one has lasted.

That evening, a man of thirty-eight or thirty-nine climbs towards the stage. His name is Francisco Cyriaco da Silva. They call him Macaco. He is a coffee porter — a trade that wears bodies down but forges strength and endurance. He is a creole from Campos, in all likelihood born a slave, a child of the Free Womb law (1871) and the Golden Law (1888). A young adept of the Brazilian game, who had watched the Japanese win night after night, has invited him to take up the challenge.

And then something unexpected happens. Myako refuses to fight.

Why? The rules of the challenge were universal: every strong man in Rio was invited, without exception. One single element distinguished Cyriaco from the previous candidates — the colour of his skin. The thesis concludes, by elimination: “Doubtless because this man was Black. No other reason justified his refusal.”

The audience, for its part, does not reason. It explodes. “Tables and chairs went flying across the theatre; whistles, shouts and insults rained down.” Faced with the fury of the house, the Japanese reverses his decision. The most famous fight in the history of capoeira took place only because a theatre audience imposed it against a discriminatory refusal.

Two rabo de arraia

The account of the fight has reached us through O Paiz of 2 May 1909 — the primary source for the entire scene. Both men wear the kimono, imposed by the theatre's management to facilitate the Japanese fighter's throws. A single round. Nearly every technique allowed. Face to face: a twenty-eight-year-old professional, a member of the Japanese bourgeoisie with twelve years of teaching behind him — and a barefoot coffee porter.

“Cyriaco developed his attack: now he leapt like a cat, now he sank so low he seemed to be sitting. The Japanese waited for the moment of the attack; but Cyriaco, with a swift flexion, sent him a violent kick — a rabo de arraia in capoeiragem slang — which brought the Japanese down at once. There was a delirium of applause.”

Myako gets up, “disposed to continue the fight”. A second rabo de arraia “all but killed him again”. He gives up.

The evening would have one consequence no one, that night, could measure: after 1 May 1909, this kick becomes the emblem of the national fighting art, in place of the sweep and the headbutt that had until then occupied the symbolic heart of the game. Capoeira begins to become what it is today — “an aerial, spectacular, acrobatic discipline”. A single fight reoriented the technical image of an entire practice.

What a victor does

The myth usually stops here. The archives continue.

In the weeks that follow, Cyriaco is in demand on every side. The medical students invite him “to demonstrate and teach the first subtleties of the techniques of capoeiragem, within the walls of the Academy of Medicine”. A coffee porter, a descendant of enslaved people, received as an expert in one of the sanctuaries of Carioca elite knowledge.

Raul Pederneiras — journalist, cartoonist, and himself a fine connoisseur of the game — approaches him “to methodise capoeiragem and open schools of instruction”. And Cyriaco makes a choice: “strengthened by his resounding victory, he decided to continue along the path of sporting combat.” He enters the international jiu-jitsu championship announced around a new Japanese champion, Raku. Then, at the international Greco-Roman wrestling championship organised in the same theatre with a professional troupe from France, “with audacity, Cyriaco decided one competition evening to challenge all the wrestlers present” (O Paiz, 8 October 1909).

The gesture demands interpretation. To challenge all the champions — European professionals paid for the show — is not bravado. It is to claim one's place in their economy: that of fees, of purses in gold pounds, of salaried troupes. Cyriaco means to be paid to take part, like the Hercules he is challenging. Far from the image of naive street talent, the sources show a professional conscious of his market value. And this datum perhaps explains, in part, the rapid erasure of his memory: a capoeira who demands his fee flatly contradicts the narrative of a folkloric, disinterested capoeiragem.

Cyriaco dies of uraemia in May 1912. The methodisation project begun with Pederneiras dies with him.

The man who did not exist under that name

One enigma remained, which the literature had never resolved: who was “Sada Myako”?

The legend must first be corrected. Contrary to the versions in circulation, the man was neither a castaway from Wake Island nor a passenger of the Kasato Maru. Commissioned by the Brazilian Navy, with his colleague Ume Kakihara, to teach “all the subtleties of their method of physical education to the apprentice sailors”, he had embarked at Yokohama in June 1908 and disembarked in December from the training ship Benjamin Constant — at the height of the worldwide jiu-jitsu vogue that followed Japan's victory over Russia.

Then, on 14 March 1931, a decree of the Brazilian government delivers the key. It orders the expulsion of one Sakuzo Miura, known as “Sack”, director of the São Paulo newspaper Nippak Shimbum, for “subversive remarks” against Brazil. Unrolling his career, the press reveals that this notable of the Japanese community had been, twenty years earlier, a jiu-jitsu instructor in the capital — under the assumed name of Sada Miako. The headline of A Batalha of 15 March 1931 says it all: “From 'jiu-jitsu' teacher to 'journalist'. The notorious Japanese expelled from Brazil.” His defeat of 1909 had, moreover, broken nothing: he taught the apprentice sailors for three more years before being replaced, in 1912, by a Brazilian instructor.

Two men, two crossed trajectories. A descendant of enslaved people who claims his worth in an economy of spectacle that was not expecting him. A Japanese contractor under a pseudonym, become a newspaper director, expelled by Vargas's Brazil. Consecrated as symbols one May evening in 1909 — and returned, both of them, to erasure. It is this double history, and not the image of the triumph alone, that the archives now oblige us to write.

SOURCES

Press archives, National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): “Jiu-jitsu vencido pela capoeiragem”, Gazeta de Noticias, 2 May 1909; “Os matchs do International. Jiu-Jitsu versus capoeiragem. Victoria do sport nacional”, O Paiz, 2 May 1909; “Sport. Jiut-jutzú”, O Paiz, 17 Apr. 1909; “Pavilhão Internacional”, O Paiz, 19–20 Apr. 1909; “Cyriaco, o homem do 'rabo de arraia' visita a' faculdade de medicina”, A Noticia, 17–18 May 1909; “Lucta Romana. Grande campeonato internacional”, O Paiz, 8 Oct. 1909; “O Cyriaco”, O Paiz, 19 May 1912; “O 'Moleque Cyriaco'. Sua morte”, Gazeta de Noticias, 19 May 1912; “O 'Benjamin Constant'”, Jornal do Brasil, 17 Dec. 1908; “De professor de 'jiu-jitsu' a 'jornalista'”, A Batalha, 15 Mar. 1931. — Pederneiras, R., “O jogo da capoeira”, Jornal do Brasil, 28 June 1931. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis in History, Université des Antilles, 2020, Part I, ch. A.2–A.3.

IN THE CORPUS

→ 1903–1909: Black Athletes as Equals in the Arenas of Rio — and the Luta Livre Born of It

→ Besouro de Mangangá, Mas Oyama, Ueshiba: Why Martial Arts Manufacture Gods

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Champion Who Refused to Fight a Black Man. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 02. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-champion-who-refused-to-fight-a-black-man. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.