Basketball
Basketball is a very popular sport, mostly in the provinces of Argentina. The Basketball Clubs' Association organizes the Liga Nacional de Básquet, the top level league in the country. Although the national team won the first FIBA World Championship in 1950, the sport did not gain country-wide popularity until the 2000s, when the national team conquered the Olympic gold medal at the 2004 Summer Olympics and had a good performance in the 2002 and 2006 World Championships, finishing on the second and fourth position respectively. Argentine NBA star Manu Ginóbili also won NBA rings in 2003, 2005 and 2007 as a member of the San Antonio Spurs, the last one with compatriot Fabricio Oberto.
Although women's basketball is not professional in Argentina, the national team participates in most international competitions, reaching their highest point at the 2006 FIBA World Championship for Women where they finished in the 9th place.
Read more about this topic: Sport In Argentina
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)