The national basketball and polo teams’ Olympic medal hopes dashed in three lost quarterfinals
The dreams of the three national teams that traveled to France to represent Greece in team sports were dashed within 30 hours, on the last two days of August 6-7. Tuesday noon around 2 p.m. the horn of the Arena Bercy secretariat signaled the end of the quarter-finals of the Olympic basketball tournament and the “official favourite” was forced to change back to her everyday clothes, beaten by world champions Germany. At 9 that evening, as Miltos Tedoglou was taking off for the gold medal, the national girls’ polo pool dried up: 6-9 from Australia, out of the semi-finals after much praise. And on Wednesday evening, at 6.30 p.m. France, said the men’s national water polo team, defeated by the Serbs with a goal that comes once in twenty years and… never at this level.
Three traumatic quarter-finals, three defeats, three medals thrown to the bottom of the Seine and ending up in foreign hands. Polo may find similar opportunities on its way again, since we are talking about a sport that is systematically practiced by very few countries on the planet, but for basketball the future looks ominous. It may be more than 16 years before the next Olympic participation, let alone a distinction.
“Know that we will rise again”
Polo men blow it and it doesn’t get cold. “That’s where this happened to us too,” said Angelos Vlachopoulos in the mixed zone of the Defense swimming pool. “I wish that what we experienced will be a nightmare and that we will suddenly wake up to play the match again” said Dimitris Skoubakis who kept the national team up until the end with his goals. “A shot of desperation became the perfect goal” commented the captain Yiannis Fundoulis. Goalkeeper Manos Zerdevas looked stunned. “We fell but know that we will rise again” he said as soon as he found his speech. “This team will be scary in the coming years and everyone will want to avoid it” promised Alexandros Papanastasiou.
Something similar happened in Paris, until the abject Serbs faced us with the style of a thousand cardinals. The two teams had faced each other in the final of the Tokyo Olympics, where Madic’s team won the gold medal and closed their circle. Since then our people drowned her at every opportunity. But the renewed Serbian team came back stronger and painted the five circles in their own blue. Spain’s elimination by Croatia in the just-concluded quarter-final had our men envisioning themselves on the top step of the podium.
However, they forgot that they also had to play. The heavy name and the heavy cap may scare some people, but not the one who has worn the Olympic gold medal on his chest for three years in a row. Even if Nikola Jaksic’s prayer of a shot sent the ball wide or into the hands of goalkeeper Zerdeva, the rest of the road to the semi-finals was uphill. Our national team had just equalized (with Vlachopoulos’ goal 6 minutes before the end), but the penalty shootout is a game of roulette. When all colors are blue, no one can predict where the ball will land.
When the curses and blasphemies were forgotten, the veterans of the national team hastened with insight to touch with their fingers the type of heels. “Here in Paris we tried to win all the matches not with defense but with attack” said Ag. Vlachopoulos. “In all but one game we had double-digit deficits. We tried to become something other than what we are. The result was to present the ups and downs you saw. Sometimes we played well and sometimes very badly for our own standards”.
G. Fundoulis completely agreed with the above conclusion: “Only in the match against Italy did we concede a single-digit number of goals. In all other matches the score went high. But our driver in this team’s great successes has traditionally been defense. Now we showed our virtues in attack. Maybe we got a little lost. We must remember, however, that the game has changed. There are now more dismissals that lead to a game with a player above, as well as individual talent. We tried to show our best selves. No one can accuse us of the opposite.”
National basketball experienced a great comeback
The degeneracy and altered identity is very reminiscent of the national basketball team, which lost its way in previous years trying to wear shoes that did not fit it. From his very first day as the federal coach, Vassilis Spanoulis tried to restore the damaged DNA and did not stop praising the so-called Greek school. “We played amazing Greek basketball in the second half, that’s why we turned the game around,” he said after the match against Canada in the Olympic tournament opener in Lille.
That opening match ended in defeat, but when the recipe was executed to perfection for 40 minutes (against Australia) our national team got the win they needed to qualify for the quarter-finals and move on to Paris. The cynic will point out that this matchup with Germany was also accompanied by a clear defeat (63-76), just like the one in last year’s Eurobasket in Berlin (96-107). Then we put 96 and lost, now we ate 76 and lost again. Different philosophy, same result.
However, last year’s national team lined up complete, while this year’s incomplete, orphaned by Sluka, Papapetrou, Thanasis and Costas Antetokounmpo, Rogavopoulos.
And the Germany of 2022 was just an ambitious team and not today’s battleship with the world title and the shiny chest. The miscreants with the red-green glasses will find pressure to get their fan base on the national team, but the team experienced a big comeback summer that it desperately needed.
Even if the qualitative characteristics are isolated (the nice basketball, the non-Lacedaemonian rally, the rekindling of the… love affair with the sports fans), the objective data define success. Betting on physically and mentally strained players, the national team left behind Spain, Lithuania, Italy, Argentina, Slovenia, Turkey, Croatia and many other aspirants. He started with the 15th position of last year’s Mundobasket and today he sees only four backs.
And he had no Paracatians to deal with nor did he fall into a group with a civilian population. In the four matches she played on French soil, she faced the world champion, the triathletes of Manila, the bronze medalists of Tokyo and the European champions. Even so, she left Paris in a panic! With a bit of luck and an extra player or two he could still be in the city of light, adorned with precious metal.
On its horizon, national basketball sees the 2025 Eurobasket which will start in Cyprus and end in Riga, Latvia. Almost all its main players, from Kalathis, Papanikolaou, Sluka, Walkap to Papapetrou, Larentzakis, Giannis and Thanasis, will then be 30-36 years old. “Yes, but in other countries they play in the national team until they are forty” raged Spanoulis, who had returned to the national team at the tender age of 39 to compete in the 2021 pre-Olympic tournament.
“Only in Greece do we have this. You turn 34 and they call you grandpa. Did Papanikolaou look old to you? I saw a player who was running and jumping like a 20-year-old kid.” He goes on to say that the radical renewal is postponed for three years, since the summer of 2026 is empty of events. “Something very beautiful is being built and the medal will come very soon” promises the coach of our national team. However, the last dance of this generation has already begun.
Strange situation in the women’s national polo
In the women’s national team, the situation is somewhat different. At least two of the players are considering ending their international careers for personal reasons, although they belong to the younger generation and not the old guard. “They have a couple more Olympians in front of them, but they don’t understand it” said Alexia Kammenou on the sidelines of the defeat by Australia. The problem is known and has been dragging on for months, on the occasion of Nicole Eleftheriadou’s thoughts about moving to the USA with her lover Sasha Vezenkov. The international basketball player returned to Olympiakos but the leaks in the pool have not stopped. The coaches of the women’s national team believe that the flight tendencies undermined the team’s readiness for the Olympic Games, combined with the health problems faced by key players (El. Pleuritou, Ninou, M. Pleuritou). The team had its ups and downs in Paris, until surrendering almost unchallenged in a passable quarter-final against Australia. “It was the game of our lives, but the stress sucked us in,” confessed Alexandra Asimaki, who returned to the national team at 35 with a baby in her arms. “The Olympics swallowed us up,” added Vasiliki Pleuritou, recalling the 16 years of absence. The women’s national team won a medal at the recent European Championships, made it to the top four at the Worlds, earned a ticket to Paris with her saber, but saw her demons return that she thought she had exorcised.
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