2024-08-08 06:19:45
We have met exactly 12 hours after the loss of the Latvian 3×3 basketball team in the bronze medal match of the Olympic Games. What are your emotions right now?
I have no emotions yet. You want to let them go and then do a self-critical analysis, going through not only the last and penultimate game, but also the whole cycle, so that you can answer the question for yourself what happened. After the analysis, I want to improve and move forward.
Can it be said that the road to these Olympic Games lasted three years and already tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the road to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics begins?
In a sense, the cycle was really three years long. During this time, our composition was renewed, the number of participants in the training process increased – in order to have a wider rotation, eight or nine players took part in training. Everything happened step by step. Before the Olympics, everyone said that the Serbs and the Americans would play in the final, and the other teams would share the third position. In the end, they are lower than us. If you look globally, the Latvian U23 national team has played well, the U21 national team has played well, we have silver in the U17 European Championship, the ladies qualified for the European Championship this year. The biggest goal was to create and set in motion the Latvian 3×3 basketball system.
As a coach, you must have thought about it all the time, but at least a year after the Tokyo Games (where gold medals were won) it seemed that we only had four 3×3 basketball players and if they ended their careers, the sport would practically cease to exist in Latvia, similar to skeleton after the Dukur brothers.
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2024-08-08 06:19:45