Meet Raquel Benetti, The Muse of Freestyle Football
Raquel Tateishi Benetti (São Paulo/SP, May 25, 1990), is a Brazilian model and practitioner of freestyle football.
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Since 2015 she has been preparing to enter the Guinness Book.
Dubbed “Muse of Freestyle Football “, it is one of the Brazilian references in this modality, and gained media notoriety by juggling the ball.
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In 2016, a video in which she appears doing kick-ups wearing high heels, in addition to being featured in the British DailyMail, had more than 500,000 views in just 4 days of publication.
Currently, more than 800,000 people from all over the world follow the jugglers of the athlete in social networks.
Raquel has appeared in several countries: Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Germany, USA, France, England, Uruguay and has been gaining space and recognition worldwide.
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Raquel began to do embellishments encouraged by her father, Nilton Benetti, at age 8.
At the age of 8, she started playing football, where she played for Corinthians’ under 20 female team for three years.
As of 2009, Raquel began to work as a model and to make Kick-Ups in campaigns and events. That same year she was hired to be the stage assistant for the Dr. Hollywood , hosted by Robert Rey .
In 2014, she paraded through the Sao Paulo samba school Leandro de Itaquera and make Kick-Ups.
In July of that same year, she posed and was the cover of the men’s magazine, Colírio Girl.
In 2015, she was the only female representative in Brazil invited to the Wass Freestyle Cup , which is a competition approved by the International Freestyle Football Federation.
At first footballers were juggling toilet roll and teabags in quarantine, but Brazilian freestyler Raquel Benetti has introduced a more eye-catching home challenge by stripping off her top while showcasing her football skills.
The 29-year-old football trickster from Sao Paulo invented the ‘strip-shirt challenge’ which requires a player to juggle the ball onto their head and remove their jersey without displacing it.
Benetti uploaded the video to her 1.2 million Instagram followers earlier this month when the world was just about entering into Covid-19 quarantine and unsurprisingly became a hit.
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“Challenge for you, tag someone that you are SURE can or cannot,” Benetti captioned the video with the hashtags #stripshirtchallenge and a cheeky “I doubt”.
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One player to catch some inspiration from the Brazilian trick queen was Manchester United midfielder Nemanja Matic, who demonstrated his unlikely skills by executing a perfect shirt removal routine in his back garden while “entertaining the kids.”
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Benetti could perhaps inspire former Corinthians players Ronaldo or Carlos Tevez to do the same challenge, but we’re not sure it will attract the same level of attention.
Nicknamed “musa das embaixadinhas” or “the muse of the freestylers” in English, Benetti is using her keepie-uppie credentials to inspire others into unorthodox home workouts, such as on the balcony or on the beach, where she can be seen bouncing the ball off the backside of fellow embaixadinhas.
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Of all the tedious workouts to surface on Instagram during the Covid-19 epidemic, we’re sure Benetti has invented the most aesthetically pleasing routine you’re likely to find.
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Among her goals in the freestyle industry, Benetti says she intends to enter the Guinness Book of Records for the 55,197 uninterrupted touches of the ball that dates back 22 years to Milene Domingues’ effort in 1997, and also the time (8 hours and 24 minutes) established by Claudia Martin , than in 2006.
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@claudia3martin
Aquí peloteando… ⚽️⚽️⚽️ (en personaje) 🎬🎬🎬
♬ Callejera – Santa Fe Klan & MC Davo
