Yesor you write the story. She always attacked with an irrepressible fighting spirit, getting up from the ground in pain and being quick with the ball and, above all, precise: Satou Sabally from Berlin led the women's basketball team to the Olympic Games.
“It was a fight, it was not pleasant to watch,” Leonie Fiebich commented on her team's 73:71 defeat in the last and decisive match of the Olympic qualification in Belém against the host Brazil. Sabally scored 20 points and eleven rebounds, Fiebich scored two more points. However, Sabally took twenty free throws at the Arena Guilherme Paraense in front of 9,000 spectators. Because she was injured, she was the Brazilians' number one opponent.
He had been injured the previous day in the loss against Australia, which followed the opening win against Serbia; In the decisive match he appeared with a fist on his left shoulder and, unlike usual, he threw a lot with his right. He jumped into the fight to draw fouls.
“Et voila!”
The pain caused by the blows, pushes and movements of his left arm was written on his face, but only until the final siren. She then cheered with her teammates, untied her braid and, like the entire team, posed with a cap that said: “Et voilà!” The “Here you go” is a special triumph for the players.
“We are in the Olympic Games. Nobody would have thought that,” said Satou Sabally: “For now I enjoy being there and being able to look at the rings in Paris.” “Satou was hurt, she endured the pain,” praised Canadian coach Lisa Thomaidis. “If you have players like that, “You can achieve a lot.”
The president of the association, Ingo Weiss, dreams of a surprise like this classification in the Games. “We don't just want to look at the Eiffel Tower, we also want to get to know it,” he says. The German Basketball Federation will compete with two teams. The men, who were proclaimed world champions in the summer and therefore favorites to win the Olympic Games, and the women begin their tournaments with the preliminary round in Lille; Only subsequent knockout matches will be played in Paris.
Female acting is already a huge success. “This is phenomenal,” Weiss said enthusiastically, “it confirms our work.” Two years ago, the association decided to provide greater support and professional structures to female basketball players. The women's Bundesliga has raised the bar.
Over the past year, driven by the men's European Championships in Cologne and Berlin, more than 30,000 girls and women joined basketball came. Now the best won the European Youth Championships and won the bronze medal at the 1997 European Championships, thereby qualifying Germany for the first time for the Olympic Games.
This is just the beginning. The Olympic Games in Lille, located just 250 kilometers west of Aachen and therefore easily accessible to German spectators, will be followed by the Women's European Championships with a preliminary group in Berlin in 2025 and the Women's World Championships in Berlin in 2026: opportunities for women in quick succession, to expand their local audience and strive to achieve success like that of men. “Everyone does it with passion,” Weiss said: “I'm an absolutely happy president.”