Brazilian Olympic Committee

Brazilian Olympic Committee

Brazilian Olympic Committee logo
Country/Region	Brazil
Code	BRA
Created	June 8, 1914
Recognized	June 8, 1935
Continental Association	PASO
Headquarters	Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
President	Carlos Arthur Nuzman
Secretary General	Sergio Vieira da Costa Lobo
Website	www.cob.org.br

The Brazilian Olympic Committee or BOC (Portuguese: Comitê Olímpico do Brasil – COB) is the highest authority in Brazilian sport and the governing body of Brazilian Olympic sport. It was officially founded on June 8, 1914 but World War I caused its official activities to begin only in 1935. It was founded at the headquarters of the Brazilian Federation of Rowing Societies (Federação Brasileira das Sociedades de Remo) as an initiative from the Metropolitan League of Athletic Sports (Liga Metropolitana de Esportes Atléticos).

The BOC has multiple sources of income, but its principal means of funding is its 2% share of all the profits from the Brazilian National Lottery and other games of chance. The BOC is presided by Carlos Arthur Nuzman, and its principal project is the 2016 Summer Olympics, to be celebrated in Rio de Janeiro.

The BOC is responsible for enrolling Brazilian athletes in every Olympic Games. The policy used by the institution is the "meritorious inclusion". This means that the BOC does not hold Olympic Trials; all Brazilian athletes that meet the requirements set forth by their sport's International Federation for participation in the Games are automatically enrolled by the BOC in their respective Olympic event — if the country has a limited number of berths in any given event in the Games and the number of athletes meeting the criteria for qualification exceeds it, the BOC will then respect the official rankings of the sport, or any other criterion used by the sport's Federation for ranking purposes, and enroll the top ranked athletes to the limit of berths assigned to the country in the Games. National teams may qualify through pre-Olympic tournaments and/or international events that award berths in the Games; individual athletes, depending on their sport, may also qualify by achieving a certain minimum performance or time for the Games (e.g. in Swimming, where athletes qualify when they swim their event in a certain time).

The BOC has a policy of never requesting "inclusion berths" in the Olympic Games: every country's Olympic Committee is entitled to request that the International Olympic Committee include athletes of that nationality in events to which they had not qualified, so long as the country in question had no athletes qualified when it had a right to enroll athletes in any given event; any national Olympic Committee may also request those berths if it has not reached the number of athletes that it had been assigned, which would cause the Olympic draws to diminish.