Basketball
History
Basketball is a perfect example of human beings’ creativity and capacity for adaptation. The sport was created by a Canadian physical education instructor in 1891. As an attempt to meet a request made by the Dean of Springfield College, in Massachusetts (USA), James Naismith invented a sport that could be played indoors, as winter made it difficult for students to practice sports outdoors.
With two fruit baskets nailed at 3.05m of height, Naismith outlined the first rules for basketball, which today is a very popular sport in the United States and the world. As any other new sport, basketball faced a lot of difficulties at the beginning. For example, the basket retained its bottom. Therefore, the ball had to be retrieved after each basket.
Due to its rapidly gained popularity, the first official game was soon held. On 11 March 1892, the Springfield College students beat a team made up of professors 5-1. Since then, basketball has not stopped evolving. In that same year, the first hoops were designed and in 1895, the backboards came onto the scene.
Indeed, it is possible to say that the game achieved a high level of popularity very quickly and at the St. Louis Olympics in 1904, it featured as a demonstration sport. At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, it featured as an official sport for the first time. That year, James Naismith himself threw the ball into the air, to celebrate the game’s inclusion in the official Olympic programme.
Curiosities
American supremacy
In 18 editions of the Olympic Games, the American basketball team failed to bring home the gold only twice. The United States’ supremacy in the sport is so great, that the only times they did not bring the gold medal home was in 1972 in Munich and in 1980 in Moscow.
The United States are the birthplace of basketball and they have won an impressive 26 medals - 21 gold, two silver and three bronze. In the last two editions of the Games, the Americans scooped up the gold in men's, as well as women's basketball. Since women’s basketball was included as an Olympic sport in 1976 at the Montreal Games, the USA has managed to win both two gold medals on five occasions. If they repeat the feat in Rio de Janeiro, it will be the first time in the history of the Games that a country manages to win the gold medal in women's and men's basketball twice in a row.
Controversial defeat
The history of basketball at the Games blends in with the United States'. The sport’s biggest winners have managed to achieve practically unreachable results. One of them is the impressive sequence of 62 victories of the men’s national team.
The Americans won every match they played at the Olympics between the Berlin Games in 1936 and Munich-1972. During this period, they managed 62 victories and won seven straight gold medals. Their first defeat came in the final of the 1972 Games, in a controversial manner.
The USA was beating the Soviet Union 50-49, with one second to go. However, due to an intervention made by R. William Jones, FIBA secretary-general at the time, the remaining time increased to three seconds. According to Jones, this change occurred because the Soviet Union manager Vladimir Kondrashkin had called for a time-out.
The two additional seconds made all the difference. The Americans were celebrating their victory already, when a Sasha Belov’s long pass turned into a basket, giving the Soviets the win and breaking the USA’s amazing 62 matches unbeaten run.
