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3 × 3 at the Olympic Games: the French women’s team qualified, not the men’s team | NBA

Marie-Eve Paget’s tears of joy. The basketball player Landes said how proud she was of the French women’s team which has just won its ticket for the Olympic Games in Tokyo, at the end of the qualifying tournament which took place this weekend, in Austria.

It is precisely on a penetration of the leader that France obtained its qualification by beating Japan on the wire (15-14). A performance hailed by the members of the 5 × 5 national team, as Sandrine Gruda.

The French women’s team will thus try to do better than its bronze medal obtained in 2019, during the World Cup. Despite their defeat, the Japanese women will also participate in the Olympic competition, as will the Americans.

These three nations join China, Romania, Mongolia as well as the “Russian Olympic Committee”, already qualified on the basis of their international ranking as of November 2019.

On the men’s side, this qualifying tournament gave rise to a mini-cataclysm on the basketball world since the Americans failed to qualify. Yet reigning world champions (2019) and second in the world rankings, they were released in the quarter-final against the Netherlands.

To qualify, the Americans, carried in particular by Joey King, a non-drafted player who passed through a university in Minnesota, had to finish in one of the top three places in this tournament, despite the 2019 world title. According to USA Today, this is the first time that American basketball players have failed to qualify for an Olympic event since 1976.

Same fate for the French who also stumbled over the Dutch (qualified) in the semi-finals, the match not to be lost. Latvia and Poland, two World Cup medalist nations, won both tickets for this summer’s Olympics. In men, Serbia, “Russian Olympic Committee”, China and Japan were already qualified.

It is recalled that the discipline is invited for the first time to the Olympic Games.

Photo credit : Twitter 3×3 FFBB

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