Basketball
Spain's men's basketball team qualified for the Olympics as the reigning world champion in the 2006 FIBA World Championship. On the other hand, the women's team finished second at the EuroBasket Women 2007, and qualified for the final five Olympic spots at the FIBA World Olympic Qualifying Tournament for Women 2008.
- 2008 Summer Olympics Spanish basketball team 'slanty-eye' photo incident
Both men and women 2008 Summer Olympics Spanish basketball teams were a part of the 'slanty-eye' gesture photo incident that took place before the Beijing Olympics. The photo was a feature ad as a newspaper spread in Spain, showing all players using their fingers to apparently make their eyes look more Chinese (Epicanthic fold) on a basketball court adorned with a Chinese dragon. The photo was part of a publicity campaign for team sponsor Seur and was used only in Spain.
"It was something like supposed to be funny or something but never offensive in any way", said forward Pau Gasol. "I'm sorry if anybody thought or took it the wrong way and thought that it was offensive."
Guard José Calderón said the team was responding to a request from the photographer. "We felt it was something appropriate, and that it would be interpreted as an affectionate gesture", said Calderón. "Without a doubt, some ... press didn't see it that way."
Read more about this topic: Spain At The 2008 Summer Olympics
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)