Athens 2004 and the 100 points for Lithuania which make the history of Italbasket
For those who play basketball, score 100 points it’s certainly no surprise. Even outside the NBA now, albeit with a different playing time.
However, at the Olympic Games, there was a time in which – apart from the USA – reaching the triple digits it certainly wasn’t easy. Especially for a team like Italy, who had only reached the bottom of the competition once before Athens 2004.
Something has changed there. There are games that enter the collective imagination and Italian basketball has had its own for the past twenty years: Italy – Lithuania, Olympic semifinal.
Final results, 100-91 for the Azzurri. It’s final and it’s a guaranteed medal, which will prove to besilver.
And who had ever seen Italy score one hundred points at the Olympic Games? In the group stage, perhaps, a Rome 1960 (100-92 over Japan) and others Munich 1972 (101-81 on the Philippines), or in one Los Angeles 1984 record: 110-62 against Egypt and 111-102 against Uruguay in the match for fifth place.
But in a match that was already worth an Olympic medal, aItaly with 100 pointshad never seen herself on a basketball court.
Never, until Gianluca Basile he didn’t start making triples from every corner of OAKA (31 points and 7/11 from the arc, calling him a graceful evening would be an understatement) with him at his side Giacomo Galanda (16 points, 4/5 three-pointers) and a Gianmarco Pozzecco (17 points) who dreams, twenty years later, of repeating himself a Paris 2024.
100 days before the Games, however, the blue dream must pass through the Olympic Qualification Tournament in Puerto Rico. And the old guard of the Olympic silver medal of twenty years ago, ready to support – or coach, in the case of Poz – today’s Italbasket met in recent days in Prato to recall that fantastic achievement.
