3×3 basketball goes from street to Olympic appearance

Anyone who has played three-street basketball knows that there are two effective ways to start a brawl in the middle of the game.

Offending someone’s mother or pointing out an offensive mistake.

In the first three-on-three-and-a-half court basketball game at the Olympics on Saturday, Dutchman Arvin Slager slammed Serbian Dejan Magstorovic, who ended up on the ground.

blew whistle. A referee in a dark gray shirt and black shorts closed his hand, extended his arm and released his fist in a completely different way than in a street match.

“Offensive foul!” shouted.

Nobody argues. It was one of the many signs that this Olympic version of the urban “street” game, as it is often called, is somewhat different from what happens on asphalt around the world.

And yes, it’s different, but hearing the guys say it’s fun.

“Three against three is basketball that is played very intensely,” said Jesse Voorn, Slager’s teammate. But it’s not street basketball.

The Olympics liked the idea of ​​”street basketball” because they did their best to include sports that appeal to a smaller, more diverse audience in the summer program. Skateboarding, surfing, sports mountaineering and, in three years in Paris, breakdancing (a dance created in the street culture of the 1980s) are among the new sports also chosen for this mission.

In at least one way, the three-to-three basketball performs the role of international expansion to perfection. A sport created and perfected on the streets of America has no American representative in the men’s branch of the eight-team Olympic category. And in the women’s branch has a team from Mongolia.

It has no fans, at least in Tokyo, where viewers were not allowed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, she has many DJs. Daft Punk, Kanye West, and others were present all day in front of the empty seats that would one day be filled again.