Best tournament ever? We shall see!
Hello from Beijing! After a few days here in China and the amazing spectacle of the opening ceremony, there is a buzz around the start of the men's basketball competition on Sunday that is impossible to miss - even in a city of 17 million and hundreds of thousands of guests.
Everyone is talking about men's basketball as not only the main event of these Olympics, but also as possibly the best tournament ever to be played. We shall see, of course, but so far, I can only agree up to a point. This is my sixth time covering the Summer Games and I have also been to seven World Champioships, 13 European Championships, every Euroleague Final Four since 1988 - two decades straight! - not to mention more than a few NBA all-star games and playoffs. Before calling these Olympics the best - don't get me wrong, they can be! - consider for a minute why people are saying so.
The main reason is that the last Olympic tournament, in my home of Athens, proved that all the ongoing improvement in world basketball was finally and undeniably true. In that summer of 2004, Argentina proved itself the world's best, something that no expert in the sport would have guessed at the start of the decade, when the dominance of the United States, until then undefeated in international play when it used NBA players, was a given. Indeed, perhaps no sport was seen then as so much of a "lock" for one country than men's basketball was for the USA. Not anymore!
Besides that Olympic victory by Argentina, the last two World Championships were won by Serbia and Spain (although neither was able to take either of the last two European Championships, which went to Greece and Russia). The bottom line is that expectations are so high for Beijing 2008 precisely because of all the great basketball being played in so many places around the world this decade.
Even though the USA's gold-medal losing streak started with a sixth-place finish in the 2002 World Championships that it hosted in Indianapolis, and also included a bronze finish in the last worlds, in Japan, I believe that the most compelling tournament ever until now was the 2004 Olympics in Athens. The very first day of that tournament saw Manu Ginobili of Argentina make a miracle shot to beat defending world champ Serbia (which would fall to 10th place in Athens!) and Puerto Rico end the undefeated Olympic streak of U.S. teams with NBA players. It just got wilder from there, with Argentina rising above host Greece in the quarterfinals, the U.S. in the semis and Italy in the title game to win that country's first Olympic gold medal in a team sport since 1952.
It's true that some people predicted as many fireworks before the 2004 Summer Games as they are predicting now, but actually seeing world basketball explode in Athens was enough for me to call that the best tournament yet. Can this one in Beijing be better? Absolutely. With a re-tooled U.S. team facing dozens of Euroleague stars on several teams from Europe and beyond, the stage is set for more pyrotechnics. The fuse was lit over the years with great work by coaches and players around the world. Now, may the best team win!
POSTED BY
Vassilis Skountis, Beijing
DATE:
Saturday, August 09, 2008