Lea Campos, the first referee

When the Brazilian national team lost the World Cup in 1950, in the Maracanã stadium (RJ), Lea was already attracting envy and intrigue playing with a ball of socks made by her father, Jahy in the small city of Buenópolis, where she lived during her childhood.

To distract herself from play that was then considered inappropriate, Lea went to singing, poetry and drama competitions from the age of eight. Because of her precocious public speaking skills, she was chosen to speak in public during a reception for Juscelino Kubitschek, then Governor of the State of Minas Gerais.

“I played during breaks at school, and the principal implied that I couldn’t, because I was playing with the boys. At the time there was that thing: girls over there, boys over here”, said Lea Campos, during an interview with the Football Museum in 2015.

JK, by then president of Brazil, gives a scholarship to Lea, who joined Imaculada Conceição College in the mineira city of Montes Claros. When adolescence arrived, and at 1.78m tall, her sporting start came in volleyball, representing different teams such as Sparta Volley Club, in Belo Horizonte.

Queen of Carnaval in Belo Horizonte, Queen of the First Regiment of Army Infantry, Queen of the Army, Queen of Cruzeiro, Queen of Students, Miss Photogenic, Queen of Combat Veterans are a few examples of her first titles.

At this time the title Queen of Amateur Football also came, won after representing a well-known amateur football team as godmother, Juventus Football Club.

Beauty contests were mostly attended by the public from different regions of Belo Horizonte, with voting from the readers of the newspaper, which contained a Queen voting coupon.

Returning to Belo Horizonte, she worked for Rádio Jornal and took the opportunity to become part of the broadcaster's sports team, becoming one of the country's first field reporters. The player Piazza was the first interviewee during his debut on the pitch at the Mineirão. In the mid-1970s, she was part of the team at Rádio Mulher, which then had a team exclusively of women. Next to Zuleide Ranieri, Jurema Yara, Germana Garilli and Claudete Troiano, Lea became even more involved in sports journalism and commentated on the refereeing of male games transmitted on the radio.

On one occasion, when heavily criticising a referee during a football march, Lea was surprised by the referee's association and the public, who said that it was easy to criticize when you're not on the pitch. For someone as competitive and stubborn as she was, the challenge was set: she would become a football referee.

Soon after, she was enrolled on the refereeing course at the Mineira Federation of Football where she initially had the company of Cesarina Rodrigues. During the eight month course, she trained in the mornings with soldiers from the police battalion to be in perfect physical condition on the day of the entrance exam.

She will not referee!
Lea's practical exam, also known as the field test, was a match between journalists and referees, some of them assessors of her final grade, during the Third National Meeting of Physical Education Teachers. Despite her excellent grades and unanimous approval, the Mineira Federation of Football did not authorise her referee's license.
The decision prevented her from refereeing games in the first or second division. But Lea soon made the news in the sporting press, pressuring the federation. The federation then consulted the Brazilian Confederation of Sports (CBD- now the CBF).

The highest body of Braziian football requested a variety of medical exams from Lea Campos, which were sometimes ignored, obliging her to redo them in locations approved by the federation.
When she was with the then president of the CBD, João Havelange, he admitted that the results were not sufficent, and alleged that the female bone structure was inferior to male, and for this reason would not authorise Lea's refereeing license.
On her own initiative, Lea underwent a series of exams, this time with doctors renowned all over the country, which certified that the female bone structure was equal to male bone structure.

In the end, Havelange appealed to article 54 of decree 3,199 of 1941, which prohibited Brazilian women from participating in sports which were "Inappropriate for their nature". However, Lea argued to the authorities that the decree did not provide legal impediment to women refereeing football matches.
Unconvinced, Havelange still used menstruation as a female attribute that would prevent women from entering onto the pitch and ended the meeting saying that while he was in charge of the organisation, no woman would referee a game.

Under the military regime, Lea Campos took advantage of the visit of then president and army general, Emilio Garrastazu Médici, to Belo Hoizonte, and managed to do what had seemed impossible: a short interview with the highest authority in the country.

Among everything that the mineira had managed to that point, the interview with the president seemed to her the final test to pass to become what she had prepared to be for years: a referee. With trembling body and memorised phrases on the tip of her tongue, Lea shared the problem that prevented her from becoming a referee in Brazil with the acting president.

Médici handed Lea a business card and scheduled a meeting for the following week, in Brasília. After a restless week, the mineira received a signed letter from the leader of the nation, ordering the CBD to grant a referee's license to Asalea de Campos Micheli.

The reporter Paulo Roverto, of Rádio Itatiaia of Belo Horizonte, leaked the news to the sporting press before Lea even had the chance to share the news with her family. The Mineira Federation of Football finally fell into line with Lea Campos and handed her the license that conferred the official referee's document for Brazil upon her, and soon after, on the world.

She repeated this in the capital of Ceará, filling the President Vargas Stadium for the match between Ferroviário and Fortaleza. Lea sent letters to the states offering herself to a number of states such as Bahia, Sergipe, Piauí and Rio Grande do Sul and smaller cities in the countryside of Minas Gerais and São Paulo.