Re: Re:
Or, to put it another way, I fail to see the relevance of the original post but am grateful for the kwikki info!
It's hard to see it as so anti-American as to deserve mention in the Brits don't dope thread. We'll have to consider the Boston Tea Party in that context next, at this rate. Not to mention the Yanks stealing our girls in WWII.kwikki said:buckle said:kwikki said:By whom?
The British media.
It was a case of plucky Russians beating the arrogant Americans at their own game. It was an absurd narrative as the Americans possessed a hundred basketball teams who could have slaughtered the best in the Soviet Union at the time but many people bought into it.
Did you watch the match?
The Russians won. The win was contentious because of the extra 3 seconds allowed at the end of the match, and because the match jury consisted of 3/5 judges from communist countries. If the 3 seconds hadn't been allowed it would have been a really narrow victory for the US, so your comment that '100 US teams could have beaten the USSR' is just untrue. The Russians were well ahead until 6 minutes left to play.
As for British media, again I disagree. Here is the actual report from The Guardian, which as you know was the most left wing of the broadsheets:
What the Guardian said: 11 September 1972
Reactions were heated after an appeal jury of the International Basketball Federation awarded the Russians the gold medal after their disputed victory over the United States in the basketball final. The American team spokesman Kenny Davis called it a “stunning blow” and said players had voted not to accept the silver medal.
“We do not feel like accepting the silver medal because we feel we are worth the gold,” said Bill Summers, chairman of the US Olympic Basketball Committee and manager of the team.
The appeals jury studied television film of the end of the game when the Americans thought they had just snatched victory only to find that officials had added an extra three seconds to the game, which allowed the Russians to rally and win 51-50.
It was the first time the Americans had ever lost an Olympic Games basketball match. There was a heated argument between Herbert Mols, assistant manager of the United States squad, and Ferenc Hepp, the Hungarian president of the appeals committee, at a press conference afterwards.
Why US women are likely to outperform the men again at the Olympics
Mols said the match had been dominated for 39 minutes and 57 seconds by the Soviet Union. “But we have not heard of any game played for 40 minutes and three seconds,” he said. He asked under what rule the three seconds had been added.
Hepp explained that the time needed to react to the time left to play when the clock stopped was one second. Hans Tenschert, the scorer of the match and one of the three men at the judge’s table, said that when the referee stopped the match there was one second to play. The referee had consulted the judges’ table and no one had said three seconds had to be played: there was only a signal.
“Only a technical delegate at the table could cancel out this signal of three seconds which came from Dr William Jones, the secretary-general of the International Basketball Federation. But the delegate kept silent and the referee had, therefore, no choice but to play three seconds,” Tenschert said.
That, to me, reads like a very neutral report.
Or, to put it another way, I fail to see the relevance of the original post but am grateful for the kwikki info!