5 min readJul 21, 2024 12:25 AM IST
First published on: Jul 20, 2024 at 09:01 AM IST
When the American basketball team makes its bid to win its fifth consecutive Olympics gold medal at Paris 2024, standing in their way impeding their path will be a familiar foe: Victor Wembanyama, a 7-foot-5-inch-tall Frenchman who wears size 21 shoes and has a wingspan of eight feet.
Wembanyama, or Wemby as he is popularly called, is coming into his home Olympics with plenty of hype and expectations for a 20-year-old. But also with the tools to justify those expectations.
Just ask LeBron James or Steph Curry.
“He doesn’t have a ceiling. There are guys in the NBA you have to account for any time you get around the rim or the perimeter. Wembanyama’s right at the top of that list with all the greats,” LeBron James said in February this year after playing against Wembanyama’s Spurs in an NBA clash where the young French rookie’s stat line read: 27 points, 10 rebounds, eight assists, five steals and five blocks. “We’ve had other players who have been great this early in their career. But what he has above all others is his length.”
Wembanyama’s 7-foot-5-inch height coupled with his lanky arms make it near impossible to score over him when he positions himself in the paint as Curry found out when Golden State Warriors played the Spurs in November last year.
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“With him on the floor, you can’t do things you normally do. He blocked my floater. And I don’t even think he jumped. Just knocked the ball away. He catches you by surprise by the things that he does because of his stature out there. You just have to be very mindful of where he is. If you try to go through him or over him, it’s going to lead to nothing.”
Even before he made his NBA debut, ESPN had called Wembanyama the “most anticipated basketball prospect in 20 years” (the last player to get so much hype before being drafted in the NBA was LeBron). It was an assessment Wembanyama more than justified in his first season: averaging 21.4 points, 10.6 rebounds and a league-leading 3.6 blocks per game to win the Rookie of the Year Award.
He was also second in the voting for the NBA Defensive Player of the Year award, behind countryman Rudy Gobert.
With Gobert and Wembanyama playing together for the French team at the Olympics, any team, even the almighty Americans, will find it hard to score at will against the French side.
“I can’t wait to face them (USA). It will be a very interesting matchup,” Wembanyama had said at a press conference in Paris recently throwing down the gauntlet. “As a basketball player, it’s also a dream to play against Team USA and against all those legends.”
In the last couple of years, that veneer of invincibility that the American basketball team wore since the heady days of the Dream Team at the Barcelona Olympics has started to fade.
At Tokyo 2020, they won gold, sure. But that was a tough title to wrest away from France, who had handed USA a defeat in the group stage and then pushed the Americans all the way in the final. Team USA eventually won the gold medal by a margin of five slender points — 87-82 — after outliving a late fourth-quarter rally in the final.
Away from the grand stage of the Olympics too, things have not gone smoothly for the American basketball team. At the FIBA World Cup, they were ousted from the competition without a medal. In two successive editions, the latest being in 2023!
No surprises then that the American basketball team flying to France for the Paris Olympics consists of bonafide superstars like LeBron (playing internationally for the first time since 2012), Curry (who will play in his debut Games) and Kevin Durant (who was in the team at Tokyo). If those names are not enough, the team also has Devin Booker, Jrue Holiday and Joel Embiid.
With the gold medal on their minds, the Americans are travelling to France with their big guns. But the host nation might just have the tallest gunslinger on their side.
France's basketball player Victor Wembanyama plays for the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA, where he just won the Rookie of the Year award. (Reuters) 
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