Athletics in Brazil has an infrastructure that moves the sport from federations and confederations, sports and social clubs, educational institutions, committees and bodies of municipal, state and federal governments. The trajectory of an athlete is loaded with records constructed and experienced by him, taking into account individual and collective episodes, as well as important transformations in this process, from his sports initiation to what can be considered as the peak of his career, the Olympic vacancy. In the history of the state of Paraná, national and international athletics names have been highlighted who have been able to follow this trajectory and win a place in one of the biggest sporting events worldwide. The present thesis has the general objective of investigating how Paraná athletes of athletics go through the subfield of athletics until they win a place in Olympic games. As methodological procedures, the predictive factors for sports success listed by Houlihan and Green were chosen, complemented by a bibliographic review and Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theoretical concepts (field, subfield, capital and habitus). The 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 Olympics were delimited to select athletes who started athletics in the state of Paraná and won an Olympic spot, seeking to converge their trajectories with sociological theory and the elements that indicate sports success. As main results it has been that the athletes of Paraná from the athletics modality who participated in the Olympic games had an average age of 25 ± 3.7 years in the Olympic year (under age 20 and over age 31), 50% were born in large centers urban and 50% in small towns. Only one of the athletes participated in the field test (A5), three athletes in the street test (A1-2004, A2-2008 and A3-2004), three athletes in speed tests (A4-2016, A6-2016 and A8-2016) and an athlete in the middle race (A7-2016). Of the Olympic editions that participated, 50% of the athletes participated in the Olympics in Brazil in 2016 (A4-2016, A6-2016, A7-2016 and A8-2016), 25% in the Athens Olympics in 2004 (A1-2004 and A3-2004 ), 12.5% at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 (A2-2008) and 12.5% at the London Olympics in 2012 (A5-2012). All athletes interviewed are from a low social class family, some without a father figure, had little social, cultural and economic capital. The disputes engendered within the subfield of competitive athletics are aimed at a multilateral relationship composed of clubs, coaches, public policies to encourage sport, private entities (sponsors / sponsors) and mega sporting events, all seeking the best athletes to represent them. The trajectory of Paraná's athletics athletes who won an Olympic spot was marked by disputes in the athletics subfield, in competition with the interests of other fields (politics, media, sport, economics, etc.), required physical and behavioral skills in order to be successful, assisted and guided by their coaches, having symbolic capital (performance potential) the bargaining tool that gave them guarantees of p...