Piedade Coutinho
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| Full name | Piedade Coutinho Azevedo (Tavares) da Silva | |||||||||||||||
| Nationality |
 Brazil
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| Born |
2 May 1920 Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |
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| Died | 14 October 1997 (aged 77) | |||||||||||||||
| Sport | ||||||||||||||||
| Sport | Swimming | |||||||||||||||
| Strokes | Freestyle | |||||||||||||||
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Medal record
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Piedade Coutinho Azevedo (Tavares) da Silva (May 2, 1920 – October 14, 1997) was an Olympic freestyle swimmer from Brazil, who competed at three Summer Olympics for her native country. She was in three Olympic finals.
Born Piedade Coutinho Azevedo, she changed her name to Piedade Coutinho Tavares when she married.
The first mass participation of women was at a crossing in 1924 in São Paulo; eight swimmers from the German club Estela participated in it. The first exclusively women's competitions occurred in 1930 in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
In 1935, the Brazilian Championship and the South American Championship, in which Coutinho participated and first appeared on the international scene, were held in Rio de Janeiro. Both were the first with women's events. Coutinho had started training in 1934 at a newly opened pool at the Clube de Regatas Guanabara. The level of competition was quite rudimentary, and being a 15-year-old novice, Coutinho did not get highlighted. The biggest Brazilian star was Maria Lenk, who competed in the Olympics in 1932 and was developing the breaststroke with recovery of arms out of the water, which would give rise to the butterfly stroke. Lenk was the first South American woman to compete at the Olympics. Coutinho's swimming improved in the space of a year; she broke the Brazilian record of 400-metre freestyle and was called to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Coutinho finished 5th in the 400-metre freestyle—the best position of all time obtained by the Brazil women's swimming in Olympic Games, along with Joanna Maranhão. Coutinho also swam the 100-metre freestyle; she did not reach the final, but finished 8th. In 1937, Coutinho finished the year with the third best time in the world in the 400-metre freestyle, and in 1938, she had two South American records in freestyle. In 1940, Coutinho improved the South American record of the 1500-metre freestyle and surpassed the records of 500-metre, 800-metre and 1000-metre; times that were approved at the time in the proof passages. At the Brazilian Championship in 1941 in São Paulo, Coutinho won the 100-metre freestyle with a time of 1:08.5—a Brazilian record and one of the best times of the world at the time—in a race she was not specialized in. With this time, she would have been Olympic finalist in 1936 and in the next edition of the Games—which would occur in 1948.
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