The fifth of February is the club’s birthday, and every year the same photograph does the rounds: young men in white beside a wooden boat, the Guamá river flat behind them, Belém doubled in the water. The photograph is from 1905. There is no football in it.
In 1905 a group of young men in this city got tired of watching foreign crews row on our river. Rowing was the smart sport then, the sport of the regattas and the newspaper social pages, and we happened to live beside one of the widest stretches of water in the world. So they started a club. They called it Grupo do Remo. Rowing group. The name is that plain.
Football arrived the way it arrived everywhere in Brazil, imported and then immediately improved on. Within a few years the boats were being ignored and the pitch was the point. The old name stayed anyway. That is why the biggest club in the north of Brazil is called the Rowing Club, and why I get to open a football blog with a story about boats.
three years and out
The first version of the club died young. By 1908 the money was gone and the members had drifted off, the way members do once the subscription comes due and the novelty wears thin. For three years there was no Grupo do Remo at all. A city this size has produced hundreds of clubs that came and went in a season, and nobody mourns them.
This one came back. On 15 August 1911 a group reorganized the club, and this time the thing held together. That date matters as much as the first one. Anybody can found a club on enthusiasm and a shared grudge against foreign rowers. Keeping it alive past the third year is the trick, and doing it twice is the reason old supporters say 1911 with the same softness as 1905.
The dead years between 1908 and 1911 get glossed over in the official histories, and I understand why. Three years is nothing in the life of a city and fatal in the life of a club. What the dates hide is that people came back on purpose, with subscriptions and a plan and the same stubbornness that started the thing. That is the harder achievement.
Football came with the second life. The first proper match against our neighbours from across town came on 14 June 1914, which turned out to be the first chapter of a book that now runs to more than seven hundred meetings. But that is a subject for another day. Literally. I have a whole post about it.
the lion, the beloved, the king
Three nicknames, and between them they say everything. Leão Azul, the Blue Lion, comes from the crest and the shirt, and it is what children here say before they can pronounce the club’s full name. O Mais Querido, the Most Beloved, is the nickname the supporters chose for themselves, and in this state it wins every vote it enters. I have seen people who agree on nothing else agree on that one.
Rei da Amazônia, King of the Amazon, is the nickname earned on the pitch. For decades the north had its own football world, its own tournaments and its own logic, before the national leagues came along and swallowed regional football whole. In that world Remo won more often than anyone else, and the title stuck. It is the nickname I like best, because it comes with a record attached and records can be argued with.
Arguing is the point of football, anyway. Ask my family.
what the record actually says
There is real silverware, for people who need silverware. The tour of Venezuela in 1950, when a squad from the Amazon crossed the border and came home with a reputation bigger than the boat they left on. The 1991 Copa do Brasil semifinal, which I remember as a feeling in the house rather than as a set of results. Seventh in Série A in 1993, the highest the club has ever finished, and the year of the goalkeeper argument that my grandfather never conceded.
And 2005. The Série C title, the first national championship in the club’s history, in the centenary year. I have never heard Baenão make a noise like the night that got decided. Some clubs collect league titles like other people collect fridge magnets. We waited a hundred years for a national one and then took it in the third division, which is either tragic or perfect depending on your temperament. I have made my peace with perfect.
For the people who want the bare bones, the record lives in the usual places. The English page for Clube do Remo on Wikipedia will hand you the skeleton: presidents, honours, stadium names, all of it. What it cannot hand you is the argument about the goalkeeper. The argument is the good part.
the boats and the boys
I went down to the river a few years ago to see the rowing section, because the anniversary had come around and I felt sentimental. It is a small operation now, a few boats and a shed, nothing like the grand regatta world of 1905. The old men down there talk about the club with an older vocabulary than the football supporters use. They say the word remo the way the founders meant it.
What struck me is that the rowers and the football supporters share the same songs and the same colours and the same blue lion, and the rowers mostly know the football songs better than the footballers know anything about rowing. That is fine. The football team carries the flag now, and it carries it into a national first division for 2026.
why the name stays
People ask why a football club keeps a rowing name after a century of football. My answer is that the rowing is the honest part of the story. The club began because a group of friends wanted to do something together on the water and were willing to pay for the privilege. Everything since, the lion and the derbies and the television money and the arguments in my grandfather’s kitchen, is that same impulse wearing different clothes.
So yes, Clube do Remo is a rowing club. There is a rowing team still, out on the Guamá in the early mornings, blue on the water, a hundred and twenty years late for practice. The football team plays in Série A. The boats keep their own time and answer to nobody.
The fifth of February is a quiet holiday in my family. My grandfather kept a blue scarf folded in a drawer with his documents, and on that day he would take it out and tell the story of the founders as though he had been there for it. He joined the club as a boy in the forties, paid his dues in coins, and got a membership card with a lion on it. He kept the card his whole life.
Five February 1905. Fifteen August 1911. Two birthdays, one club, and a lion that has never rowed a stroke in its life.
