RIO DE JANEIRO — One of the world’s most improbable sports centers is a hulking, light-blue building on a mud-caked alley in Chacrinha, a favela on the western outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Inside are four gleaming, regulation-size courts for badminton, a game that until recently few Brazilians had ever heard of, let alone played.

This is the Miratus Center, and on any given afternoon about 200 local boys and girls will train there, dressed in matching yellow and green shirts. For the best of them, 19-year-old Ygor Coelho de Oliveira, this is not just his home court; it is his home. Or rather, the courts and his home are parts of the same structure, both hand-built by his father, Sebastião, a physical education teacher and a self-trained carpenter. Open the window in his second-floor living room and you are looking directly down on the courts.

“I wanted to take full advantage of the view and see what’s happening,” the elder de Oliveira said. “It’s like watching television for me.”

His son is lean, perpetually upbeat and on the verge of making history. Come August, he and another Miratus player, a 20-year-old woman named Lohaynny Vicente, will be the first Brazilian badminton players at an Olympics. De Oliveira is ranked No. 62 in the world, while Vicente is 72nd, which is astonishing considering how difficult it is to improve without regular pummelings by a community of superiors.

Then again, the men’s and women’s draws at the Olympic Games are each composed of just 38 players. These two have gained entry to the sport’s most prestigious tournament courtesy of a little-known benefit of hosting the games: Spots are set aside for athletes from the host country as long as they are reasonably competitive. De Oliveira is more than good enough to meet the standard, as is Vicente, but to call him a long shot for a medal would be generous. And this makes de Oliveira part of an unusual subset of people now being celebrated by the Brazilian news media — athletes with inspiring back stories who are definitely going to lose.

“We don’t want to humiliate anyone,” said João Pedro Paes Leme, director of sports at Rede Globo, Brazil’s biggest television network. “But at the same time we want to point out the people who are producing the best efforts of their lives to be here. Even they know they are not going to win a medal. Their medal is to compete in the first round. And some of those stories are more popular with viewers than stories about gold medalists.”

The focus on people like de Oliveira is compelled by simple arithmetic. The country’s Olympic delegation is 450 athletes strong. Brazil’s Olympic committee has set a goal of winning 25 to 30 medals in Rio. Were Globo to focus only on winners, it would cover fewer than 10 percent of the Brazilian participants. So in addition to features about Olympic heroes from around the world, as well as in-country contenders, Globo is broadcasting tales that could be labeled “Uplifting Narratives of Imminent Defeat.”

It is a genre perhaps unimaginable on U.S. television, which will follow Olympic underdogs as long as they might sink a fang into some precious metal. The more you know about Ygor de Oliveira, the more that seems like a shame — mostly because if we never met him, we would never meet his father, who made a quite peculiar dream come true through sheer force of will.

The man behind ‘the project’

Sebastião Dias de Oliveira is 51 and looks a lot like Danny Glover during his “Lethal Weapon” days, minus the mustache. He is the coach at Miratus, as well as its architect and builder, so he usually has children in his wake, directing them through a mix of shouts, hand gestures and charisma. Considering that he is the mind and the muscle behind this quixotic venture, de Oliveira comes across as a surprisingly reasonable man, and never more so than when he describes the genesis of what he calls “the project.”

Raised mostly in an orphanage in Rio, he saw his mother during vacations when the two would scavenge for recyclable material at what was then the world’s largest garbage dump. (That dump, Gramacho, the setting for the 2010 documentary “Waste Land,” has since closed.) Many years later, in 1998, a colleague at the high school where de Oliveira teaches handed him a badminton racket, bought during a trip to Italy.

“I said to him: ‘Is this for tennis? A tennis ball will go right through this,’” de Oliveira recalled, speaking through an interpreter while sitting in the cafeteria he recently added to the center.

There is no ball, his friend explained. There is a birdie. Let’s try it.

Without a net, the pair volleyed back and forth on a beach. De Oliveira was smitten.

“The sport chose me,” he said. “I knew right away that this is what I had to do with the project.”

The project until then was a swimming pool, which he was digging next to his home. Like many favelas, Chacrinha is a kind of off-the-grid shantytown, at once neighborly and dangerous. The pool would be a community center and a path for children whose first opportunities had long come from drug traffickers in search of new recruits.

He ceased work on the pool and started building a badminton court, by himself, with whatever tools he could find. Everyone, including his wife, thought the concept ludicrous. Badminton? In a favela? There was just a smattering of courts around the country, most of them in posh places, like country clubs.

But de Oliveira was going to single-handedly create Brazil’s only hot zone of badminton talent. He started with a single outdoor court, made of asphalt, on which children played barefoot. Dozens of others started showing up, and he commenced the 17-year effort to create an ever-expanding indoor facility.

“My dream is that someone who grew up in a favela and trained in a favela could inspire other kids in favelas,” de Oliveira said. “I want to highlight success rather than crime.”

Learning From YouTube

De Oliveira knows that the best chance to achieve this dream now rests in the agile hands of his son, who has a toothy smile and a vicious overhead. Ygor de Oliveira’s Olympic nod, along with the irresistible home-court angle of his life, has turned him into the face of Miratus, and Globo has visited to film him a number of times.

He learned much about the mechanics of the game — above-the-waist stuff, like the swing — from YouTube videos of the sport’s superstars. His only sustained brush with strong competition came in 2014, when he spent three months in Denmark, a powerhouse of the game, with money he won at a tournament.

“I started here,” he said of his time in Denmark, signaling his skill level by placing a hand at shoulder height. Then the hand soared above his head. “And I ended here.”

He is up against athletes from countries like China, where the talent pool is about 100 million strong and the government generously underwrites training, housing and meals for the finest players. Ygor de Oliveira appears too enamored of these luminaries to envy them. At a recent test event in Rio, he met Lin Dan, perhaps the greatest badminton player in history, who will soon compete for his third consecutive Olympic gold medal.

“Someone taught him to say, ‘Happy birthday,’ in Portuguese, to me,” Ygor de Oliveira said, grinning brightly. “It was a producer at Globo, actually. And I got a picture with him.”

There is a steely competitor under that giddy exterior, and Ygor de Oliveira has stunned his share of higher-ranked opponents. Nobody seems to have explained to him that just participating in the Olympic Games is triumph enough, and he said he would like to get to the quarterfinals. But if these Olympics do not work out, he is young and confident enough to predict that there will be others.

Then again, he added, he is a national favorite, which means a lot of fans in Rio will be cheering him on. You never know. Or as he put it, in words that he might have learned from his father, “Anything is possible.”