The Brazilian Olympic Committee (COB) raised the suspension of volleyball player Wallace Leandro de Souza to five years on Tuesday, after “failing” the 90-day sanction for having incited violence on Instagram against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The 35-year-old Olympic champion with Brazil in Rio de Janeiro-2016 had published a story at the end of January with a photograph of himself in a shooting club, asking his more than 350,000 followers if they would shoot the president, with the social network question tool.
The publication sparked a scandal and the award-winning volleyball player was suspended from the courts by the COB for a period of 90 days from February 3.
However, Wallace managed to file an appeal with the Superior Court of Sports Justice of Volleyball (STJDV) that supposedly enabled him to play the final of the men’s Super League on April 30.
In that match, Wallace entered the pitch as a reinforcement for his team, Sada Cruzeiro from Belo Horizonte, which became champion.
But the COB delegitimized the authorization and considered that both the athlete and the Brazilian Volleyball Confederation (CBV) disobeyed the suspension.
The player “acted freely on the field when he was suspended from his activities as a result of an unethical act (…) consisting of inciting violence through social networks suggesting shots against the president,” says the resolution published by the COB Ethics Committee on its website.
For this reason, he decided to aggravate the suspension “from 90 days to 5 years” applied to Wallace, “keeping him away for that period from any event” of the federation, confederation or Olympic committee.
It also increased the term by which the player is barred from representing the Brazil national team, from which Wallace retired in 2022, from one to five years.
The CBV, which allowed Wallace’s participation on Sunday, was also sanctioned this Tuesday and suspended from the COB.
Faced with the repercussions of his post, the player, a well-known follower of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, deleted the story and publicly apologized.
But Lula’s government immediately called for sanctions and an investigation against the athlete.