2010 World Championships of Basketball
The FIBA World Championships are coming!
Held every four years, the tournament last took place in Japan in 2006, when Spain surprised the world by taking the gold medal while the USA shocked everyone, but mostly themselves, with a third-place bronze medal finish.
The global level of basketball play has increased strongly since that fateful day in 1992 when the USA’s Dream Team showed the world how much better they really were and made a mockery of almost every opponent it faced. But since then, it’s as if the rest of the world fed off their energy and ability, and took the international game to new heights. Now, with many international players playing in the NBA, and similarly many US-born players playing in foreign leagues, the title is certainly up for grabs this year. I certainly wouldn’t put my money on a favourite.
The event kicks off on 18 August 2010 and will be held in Turkey this year. The finals take place on 12 September, and in that time 24 teams will be competing to be crowned the world’s best basketball playing nation.
Africa will be represented by three countries this year:
- Angola [ranked 12th in the world]
- Cote d’Ivoire [40th], and
- Tunisia [42nd]
While Angola is clearly the top African team, they won’t have an easy time with Germany and Australia, amongst others, in their group. Cote d’Ivoire may have the easiest group of these three, so hopefully they’ll be able to take advantage and throw in some surprise results.
The full schedule for the tournament is available on FIBA’s dedicated World Championships website here.
FIBA has also created an awareness campaign entitled “Giant Get Together”. The campaign was launched on 1 April and currently consists of five adverts [the last four are all basically shortened versions of the first one with a couple of new clips in].
The idea is quite fitting and it’s done really well – you can see the first advert here:
All five videos are available both on FIBA’s World Championships website and on Youtube -worth checking out a couple at least.
Well, if you’re in the mood for some great basketball and have the yearning to see it, a flight will set you back R5,000 to R10,000, and tickets to the games go for about €250 [the final will be closer to €1,000], so expect to spend around R20,000 to R25,000 for the whole experience. Or you can wait and hope that there will be some decent local television coverage.
Either way, this year’s championships are bound to be a fascinating spectacular in the fight for global basketball domination!
Which country do you think will win it this time around?
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