119-year-old Brazilian Woman Stakes Claim as World's Oldest Person

Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes
Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes
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119-year-old Brazilian Woman Stakes Claim as World's Oldest Person

Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes
Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes

Two months away from what she says is her 120th birthday, Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, a great-grandmother from the state of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is rushing to be recognized as the world’s oldest living person by the Guinness World Records.

The institution currently features another Brazilian, Inah Canabarro Lucas, a nun from the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul as the oldest living person at 116 years, but Deolira’s family and doctors are confident that she will soon take the religious woman’s title.

“She is still not in the book, but she is the oldest in the world according to the documents we have on her, as I recently discovered,” said Deolira’s granddaughter Doroteia Ferreira da Silva, who is half her age, Reuters reported.

The documents show that Pedro da Silva was born on March 10th 1905 in the rural area of Porciuncula, a small town in the state of Rio. She now lives in a colorfully painted house in Itaperuna, where her two granddaughters Doroteia, 60, and Leida Ferreira da Silva, 64, take care of her.

The grandmother is also supervised by doctors and researchers who are interested in how she outlived the average life expectancy in Brazil, which currently sits at 76.4 years, by more than four decades.

“Mrs. Deolira, in 2025, will be 120 years old. She is in a good general state of health for her condition, she is not taking any medication,” said geriatric doctor Juair de Abreu Pereira, who checks up on Pedro da Silva frequently and is assisting her family in the process with Guinness World Records.

In a statement, Guinness said it couldn't confirm receiving Pedro da Silva's application, because it receives many from people around the world who claim to be the oldest living person.

Major floods in the region almost twenty years ago destroyed most of Deolira’s original documents, her doctor said. That may pose a challenge for the official recognition of her age.

Even if her age is not precise, Pedro da Silva is certainly older than 100 years, according to Mateus Vidigal, a researcher at the University of Sao Paulo who has studied her case as part of a project to understand the super elderly population of Brazil.

“Mrs. Deolira has not been excluded from the study, but there is this fragility which is the lack of documentation that is approved by those organizations,” Vidigal said, referring to vetting institutions such as the Guinness World Records.

Pedro Silva’s healthy diet and sleeping habits are key to her longevity, according to Dr. Pereira. To this day, she has a good interaction with her family and likes eating bananas.

“I wish I could get to her age and be like that,” Ferreira da Silva, her granddaughter, said. “While we have high blood pressure and diabetes, she does not have any of that.”



A Rare Gold Medal from the 1904 St. Louis Olympics Is up for Auction

This Nov. 2024 image provided by RR Auction shows a rare gold medal from the 1904 Olympics at the intake office of RR Auction, in Amherst, N.H. (RR Auction via AP)
This Nov. 2024 image provided by RR Auction shows a rare gold medal from the 1904 Olympics at the intake office of RR Auction, in Amherst, N.H. (RR Auction via AP)
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A Rare Gold Medal from the 1904 St. Louis Olympics Is up for Auction

This Nov. 2024 image provided by RR Auction shows a rare gold medal from the 1904 Olympics at the intake office of RR Auction, in Amherst, N.H. (RR Auction via AP)
This Nov. 2024 image provided by RR Auction shows a rare gold medal from the 1904 Olympics at the intake office of RR Auction, in Amherst, N.H. (RR Auction via AP)

A gold medal awarded to the winner of the 110-meter hurdles at the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, the first Games hosted on US soil, is being auctioned off as part of hundreds of lots of memorabilia representing various Olympics over the decades.

The medal bears the inscription "Olympiad, 1904" and shows a victorious athlete holding a wreath on the front. On the other side, Nike, the goddess of victory in ancient Greek mythology, is shown alongside Zeus, the pantheon's king of gods, and the words for the hurdles event it was awarded. The medal, awarded to American Fred Schule, includes the original ribbon and leather case.

This was the first Olympics where gold medals were awarded and the Americans took advantage, winning 78 of 96 events. Unlike Olympic medals these days which are mostly made of silver with gold plating, these were smaller and made entirely of gold.

Bobby Eaton, an Olympic specialist at Boston-based RR Auction, said it is unusual for a medal of this kind to come up for auction though this particular one came from Schule's family’s collection.

"No one really knows exactly how many 1904 Olympic gold medals are still out there," Eaton said. "What we do know is they’re exceedingly rare. Of the roughly 100 gold medals awarded in St. Louis, many have been lost to time or are tucked away in private collections and museums."

Beyond the gold medals, the 1904 Games also were remembered for plenty of controversy and oddities.

The Games were originally awarded to Chicago, but organizers of the World’s Fair in St. Louis feared competition for attendance and protested against a second international event held simultaneously. Fair organizers threatened to host their own athletic events. It took the founder of the modern Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin, to forge peace by moving the Olympics 300 miles (483 kilometers) south.

If that drama weren't enough, Fred Lorz looked to have won the marathon race until it was discovered he rode partway in a car.

Organizers ran "Anthropology Days," when members of indigenous tribes from across the globe on hand for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the formal name of the St. Louis World's Fair, were plucked from the fair and told to compete with no warning.

The Games also saw the debut of boxing and freestyle wrestling, sports that have clung to the Summer Olympics until the present day, along with long-since-forgotten croquet and tug-of-war events.

"These medals aren’t just about the competition — they’re a snapshot of the early days of the modern Olympics," Eaton said. "To have one like this, in such exceptional condition, is truly remarkable and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for collectors."

The sale is part of hundreds of Olympic items that were up for sale at the auction, including a bronze medal from the 2024 Paris Olympics, as well as gold medals from the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, 1964 Tokyo Olympics, 1998 Nagano Olympics and 2012 London Olympics.

Olympic memorabilia has long fetched a good price.

In 2022, the silver medal captured by Luz Long, the German long jumper who befriended Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, sold at auction for more than $488,000. A first-place silver medal awarded at the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 sold for $180,111 when it was put up for auction in 2021 and a gold medal from the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver sold for $68,750 in 2019.

Athletes also have auctioned off their medals for charity, including two-time canoe champion Yuri Cheban from Ukraine whose two golds and a bronze were auctioned for $109,451 in 2022 to help the war effort. Swimmer Ryan Lochte auctioned off his six Olympic silver and bronze medals the same year, with the $166,779 raised going to an organization benefitting children. He kept his gold medals.

The next summer Olympics will be in Los Angeles in 2028, marking the third time the city has hosted the Games. It also hosted the Games in 1932 and 1984.