Dr. Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff
Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor in New York University Preston Robert Tisch Institute for global sport. She specializes in the history of global sport, communications and diplomacy. She is authors of “Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA (2003, Bloomsbury).
Email: lkrasnoff@gmail.com
L’impossible n’est pas français (the impossible is not French). That sentiment reigned for more than thirty minutes of play during the Olympic basketball gold medal matches as the hosts pressed the U.S. men and women to a brace of thrilling finishes.
It was the first time that the same two countries contested both finals, and the matchups did not disappoint. Les Bleus were neck-and-neck with Team USA until Steph Curry, arguably one of the best all-time shooters, unleashed a series of three-point shots in the game’s dying minutes to seal the gold medal. The next day, Les Bleues pushed the United States to the edge, and if a two-point buzzer-beater basket by Franco-American ace Gabby Williams was taken a few centimeters further away, France would have won.
The Paris 2024 Games will be remembered as one of the greatest in modern memory and basketball was a notable standout. Throughout two weeks of competition, first in Lille then in the City of Light, twenty-four of the world’s elite women’s and men’s teams hooped, entertained, and provided fans with a range of roller-coaster emotions. The depth and quality of play was arguably the best-ever, a legacy of how the 1992 U.S. Dream Team opened the floodgates to a game already indigenous across all continents. Some of basketball’s biggest stars represented their country this summer, which added glamour and encouraged a record 1,078,319 spectators to attend.
Each team engaged in sports diplomacy as their presence and performances communicated, represented, and negotiated about their country and hoops game. But none more so than France and its Olympic vice champion teams. Paris 2024 was an example of French sports diplomacy and cultivation of soft power in how the national teams bolstered a “Made in France” brand and identity as one of the world’s great basketball countries.
It’s a story more than 130 years in the making, when the first basketball match was played on European soil in Paris December 1893. The game remained a niche sport in France until the First World War spread its gospel. The first female leagues began play in the 1920s, while the sport was adopted by the military and Catholic schools. Arrival of U.S. G.I.s in 1944-45 reassociated the game with modernity, while thousands of French flocked to watch the Harlem Globetrotters in the 1950s. Players like Martin Feinberg and Henry Fields reintroduced the hexagone’s hardcourts in the 1950s and 1960s to the tactics, techniques, and stylings of its ami américain, while early U.S. female pioneers and Olympians found a place to play after high school in the 1970s. Then French players started to play in the United States as part of their team’s starting five, first in the NCAA in the mid-1980s, then in the WNBA and NBA as of 1997.
Since then, the transatlantic flow of players, coaches, and savoir faire has flowed in both directions. The resultant informal citizen-to-citizen sports diplomacy cultivated cultural, technical, and knowledge exchanges that imprinted the French game, and began to influence U.S. leagues. That’s part of the story told in Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA, and the Olympic basketball tournaments notched the next chapters.
At Paris 2024, French basketball diplomacy was on full display as the national teams communicated, represented, and negotiated about the country and its hoops culture. They showcased France’s best talent, women and men who hone their skills in the NBA, WNBA, and Euroleagues and whose meritocratic successes speak to the aspirational ideals of a twenty-first century Fifth Republic. They come from a range of family backgrounds, some with a parent who was born in the United States, Africa, or the French Caribbean, others who are second or third generation elite or professional athletes. Many grew up in the country’s basketball bastions of Normandy, Brittany, the North (Nord-pas-de-Calais), and greater Paris, and thus bring different experiences and references to team alchemy.
France’s on-court performances also communicated, represented, and negotiated about French basketball. The players’ tenacity, particularly in playing such closely contested matches with the favored U.S. teams, spoke to development of a winner’s mentality, something that was not always part of a culture that historically prioritized participation. They displayed a high basketball IQ, as well as why Team France are known as “the United States of basketball in Europe”: for their physicality and athleticism.
The host’s twin silver medals reinforced the country’s twenty-first century identity as a basketball breeding ground. It’s a “Made in France” brand of excellence in youth sports development that feeds the world’s elite professional championships. First recognized within the ranks of football (soccer), increasingly it is acknowledged in basketball, too, as season after season French teenagers are among the top draft selections in the NBA and WNBA. That mark was bolstered by the Paris 2024 tournament turnouts, television spectatorship, and by national team results, thus further legitimizing France’s place as one of the world’s big basketball powers.
That’s why the gold medal matchups were a clash in sporting power as two of the leading hoops nations inscribed new chapters in their growing (friendly) basketball rivalry. Hoops sensation Victor Wembanyama, perhaps the most famous Frenchman today, noted of his France vs Team USA experience, “I am learning, and I am worried for our opponents in the years to come.”
