3×3 Olympic champion Svenja Brunckhorst – “We gave the Spanish king a high-five”
imago images/Goal Sports
Audio: rbb24 | 09.08.2024 | Kathrin Wosch and Tom Böttcher | Image: imago images/Goal Sports
The German 3×3 basketball players were one of the discoveries of the Olympic Games. In the middle of it all: Svenja Brunckhorst from Berlin. How she explains her success and why she was happy to have two kings in the audience.
rbb: Svenja Brunckhorst, what was more strenuous: The Olympic 3×3 basketball tournament, in which you and your team won gold at the end or the celebrations afterwards?
Svenja Brunckhorst: Can I be honest?
They laugh.
The tournament was obviously very intense, but what came afterward really overwhelmed me. How many interviews, requests and pictures there were. It was a bit exhausting, but really unbelievably beautiful, how much love we received. It’s simply indescribable what’s happening right now.
It’s not every day that you play and the Spanish king sits right on the sidelines and next to him is the German basketball king Dirk Nowitzki. How was that?
Very special. We had already speculated that Dirk Nowitzki would come to the game. And yes, we gave the Spanish king a high-five. It’s something you can do. There were really so many legends there. It was very, very special.
It was a real 3×3 wave that you rode, with an almost flawless record all the way to the sensational gold. How do you explain that?
I think at the beginning it was a bit of an underdog mentality that we had. We had also won five out of five games in the qualifying tournament. But we were still in the Olympic field. Of course, we were still well prepared and said: OK, we just want to enjoy it! Maybe we just didn’t have the pressure in the first few games that many favorites have.
And then we built on our strengths. We have incredible trust in this team and at some point we were riding this wave and no one could stop us.
The 3×3 game is very fast. There is actually no time to rest. Thanks to you, many people who perhaps didn’t even know it before the Olympics liked it. What potential does 3×3 basketball have in Germany?
I think it’s a very big one. We’ve received lots of great messages from people who saw it for the first time. The drama in this game is really enormous and I hope that we’ve been able to get something going, that kids have options to play more 3×3, that there are finally tournaments in Germany. There are far too few of them, especially compared to other countries.
For you personally, the final was the last game of your long and very successful basketball career. You will now play for Alba Berlin Manager for girls’ and women’s basketball. At the tender age of not even 33. Haven’t you been itching to get back on the field a bit?
My coach asked me if that was really it. And ultimately it was a surreal ending. I imagined the end of my career, but of course I never pictured it like that. But at the moment it doesn’t feel so much like the end of my career, but rather like winning the gold medal. And at some point I hope that I will achieve both. But I think it is a perfect ending for me.
Thank you for the interview.
The interview is a slightly shortened and edited version of a Radioeins conversation. It was conducted by Kathrin Wosch and Tom Böttcher.
Broadcast: Radioeins, 09.08.2024, 07:40 a.m.
