Satou Sabally (l.) and Svenja Brunckhorst (r.) fought their way to the Olympics against Brazil’s star player Kamilla Cardoso.
Photo: image/Photoarena
After the final siren, Satou Sabally even needed help to loosen her hair tie. Her left arm had been hanging limply for minutes. She normally throws basketballs with it, but her shoulder was injured, actually for days. She still gritted her teeth for the dream of the Olympics and played for the German Basketball Association (DBB) team against Brazil for a ticket to the Summer Games in Paris. Sabally even threw free throws with his weaker right hand. She clearly never wanted to be accused of not giving everything to this dream. In the end the scoreboard read 73:71. For the first time, German basketball players qualified for the Olympics on Sunday evening, and in an outstanding way.
»When you have a goal in mind and everyone believes in it, it’s as if the energy just carries you forward. “That happened today,” said the best German basketball player, describing her exertion in Belém. Despite the injured shoulder, she scored 20 points, grabbed eleven rebounds, provided four assists and stole the ball twice from the frenetically cheered hosts. »The whole team showed so much will to win. Satou endured the pain. That made such a difference. “When you have players like that, you can achieve a lot,” said national coach Lisa Thomaidis, praising her star before the two even exchanged autographs.
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Sabally wasn’t the only one who ignored pain in this “battle”, which had absolutely nothing to do with the previous disembodied game, mainly because of the Brazilians’ overly tough defense. Her sister Nyara scored ten points despite a leg injury. Center player Marie Gülich only sat on the bench for 41 seconds, although an opponent stretched her arm and she had to take three elbow checks to the head.
Leonie Fiebich was tackled while fighting for the ball and then hit her back on the floor so hard that she had to be carried off the field in tears. She returned ten minutes later and scored 22 points, more than any other player in the match. “It was a fight, it wasn’t nice to watch,” Fiebich said later. »But this team deserves it. We’ve just been fighting for the last few years, and we’ve finally been rewarded. It’s incredibly beautiful to witness.”
In fact, there is a long period of suffering behind the DBB women. Due to many coaching changes, hardly any support from the association and with a weak Bundesliga behind them, even European championships were missed. But the turning point came with the rather coincidental signing of the Canadian Thomaidis in spring 2023. The surprising sixth place at the European Championships in Slovenia in the summer brought the Germans to the qualifying tournament in Brazil. There, now reinforced by the Sabally sisters playing in the WNBA, they defeated Serbia and Brazil, who were tenth and eighth in the world rankings. The DBB team is only in 25th place in the ranking, but is now the only team outside the top twelve that was able to qualify for Paris.
This squad had hardly played together before. There were more Zoom calls with the Sabally sisters than training days together. Accordingly, captain Svenja Brunckhorst was overwhelmed at the press conference on Sunday evening: »I am speechless. We overcame so many hurdles and never let ourselves get discouraged.” We knew it would be hard, added the 32-year-old, who also wants to qualify for Paris in 3×3 basketball. »How many times have we laid here on the floor in pain. But not one of them gave up at any point. We kept reassuring each other that we could do it. The team spirit went through the roof during this tournament.«
Since the men’s national team’s success with European Championship bronze in 2022 and the World Cup title a year later, the DBB has registered more and more young girls in its clubs, which it now wants to take more care of. These young talents will now have direct role models on the Olympic stage as well as at the home tournaments of the 2025 European Championships in Hamburg and the 2026 World Cup in Berlin. It could be a golden decade for all of German basketball.
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