Hoop venues ready for Olympics

LONDON - Basketball will be played in two venues at the Olympics next year and fans are expected to pack the arenas  not to cheer for the Great Britain men’s team but to watch the US squad made up of NBA stars. There are basketball games scheduled for the entire duration of the Olympics from July 28 to Aug. 12.

So far, nine teams have qualified for the men’s category. World champion US leads the pack. Other qualifiers are host Great Britain, Tunisia of Africa, Argentina and Brazil of the Americas, Australia of Oceania, Spain and France of Europe and China of Asia. Three more teams will be added to the cast from the wildcard qualifiers on July 2-8 next year.

The wildcard qualifiers will involve Angola, Nigeria, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, New Zealand, Russia, Macedonia, Lithuania, Greece, Jordan and Korea. The second and third placers of the recent FIBA-Asia Championships booked tickets to the wildcard qualifiers. The Philippines would’ve been included in the qualifiers if only Gilas beat Korea in the playoff for third. As it turned out, Korea edged the Philippines by two.

The women’s competition will also feature 12 teams. Assured to play are host Great Britain, US, Russia, China and Australia. The Americas and African champions will also earn automatic berths. Five teams will be included from the wildcard qualifiers.

The host country will be pitifully ignored in the men’s tournament. Great Britain didn’t even make it to the quarterfinals of the recent FIBA Europe Championships despite the presence of NBA veterans Luol Deng and Robert Archibald. The British are coached by two Americans, Chris Finch and Nick Nurse. Finch was a long-time coach of the English club Sheffield Sharks and is now a Houston Rockets assistant coach. Nurse also spent several years coaching in the English league with the Brighton Bears and is now with the NBA D-League.

Under FIBA rules, a national team is allowed to enlist only one naturalized player. But in Great Britain’s case, there are several “foreigners,” including Deng who was born in Sudan, Devon Van Oostrum of Holland and Nathan Reinking of Ohio. Nine of the 12 players saw action in US NCAA Division I schools, namely, 6-0 Ogooluwa Adegboye of St. Bonaventure, 6-1 Andrew Lawrence of the College of Charleston, 6-3 Michael Lenzly of Wolford, 6-8 Drew Sullivan of Villanova, 6-7 Deng of Duke, 7-0 Archibald of Illinois, 6-2 Reinking of Kent State, 6-10 Eric Boateng of Arizona State and 6-5 Kyle Johnson of Long Island University. How the Olympic host was able to legitimize more than one foreigner as national players should be investigated.

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The preliminary hoop games will be played at a “temporary” venue called the Basketball Arena, a 12,000-seat facility. Construction of the arena began in Oct. 2009 and was completed last June. The same venue will be used for the knockout rounds of men’s handball, wheelchair basketball and wheelchair rugby.

The basketball finals will be staged at the North Greenwich Arena. After the Olympics, the Basketball Arena will be dismantled and parts of it will be recycled or relocated in various stadiums in the UK.

The tricky transfer from the Basketball Arena to the North Greenwich Arena will entail removing the goals and remarking the floor for handball within 22 hours. At the Paralympics, there will be only 12 hours to prepare the Basketball Arena for wheelchair rugby after the wheelchair basketball tournament.

The Basketball Arena is situated north of the Olympic Park where the main attractions are the 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium and the awesome Acquatics Center. The Olympic Park is situated in east London. Organizers are anticipating that 500,000 fans will visit the Basketball Arena to watch the games in both the Olympics and Paralympics.

The North Greenwich Arena, also known as the O2 Arena, was renovated in 2007 and is a multi-purpose stadium where the New Jersey Nets and Toronto Raptors played last March. It is 4.2 miles from the Olympic Park. Artistic gymnastics, trampoline gymnastics, basketball and wheelchair basketball are the events booked at the O2 Arena.

Built on the south bank of the River Thames, the O2 Arena was originally opened in 2000 when it was known as the Millennium Dome. It was closed after a year then bought by the Anschutz Entertainment Group in 2005. The O2 Arena has become a popular venue for big events like the Ultimate Fighting Championship contests, tennis tournaments, opera and rock concerts. Public transport links will make it easy for athletes, spectators and officials to travel to the venue from the Olympic Park. 

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John White, in the book “The Olympic Games Miscellany,” said that not all the events in the London Olympics will be held in the city and a few won’t even be staged in England. The football matches for men and women will be played in six venues  Wembley Stadium in northwest London, St. James Park (home of Newcastle United), Old Trafford (home of Manchester United), the City of Coventry Stadium, Hampden Park in Glasgow and the Millennium Stadium in Wales.

The men’s competition will comprise 16 countries and the women’s, 12. The games reel off on July 25, two days before the opening ceremony. The women’s finals will be on Aug. 9 with the men’s edition two days later.

Sailing will be off the south coast of the English Channel. Mountain bike of cycling will be in Essex, about 45 kilometers from London. The Stillwater rowing and canoe events will be at Eton Dorney, 40 kilometers west of London, and at the Lee Valley White Water Center, a few miles north of Stratford. 

The beach volleyball games will be staged on Horse Guards Parade, a short walk from Buckingham Palace and the River Thames in the heart of London. The Parade hosts the annual trooping of the color celebration that takes place to mark the Queen’s birthday and the grounds date back to 1745. It is 3.6 miles from the Olympic Park. Prime Minister David Cameron’s back garden at 10 Downing Street is part of the Horse Guards Parade.

Equestrian  jumping, dressage and eventing  will be at Greenwich Park, London’s oldest royal park laid out in 1433. It has been a world heritage site since 1997 and is home to a small herd of wild deer.