Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Lithuania – the land of basketball

It is said that basketball in Lithuania is a religion. And I absolutely agree! We love basketball. And we are good at it! I am very proud about achievements of our Lithuanian national basketball team. We are the nation of 3 million and we are one of the best basketball players in the world.
Since 1937 Lithuanian national men basketball team three times won bronze medals in Olympic Games, once won bronze medals in World Championship, three times became the winner of European Championship, once won silver medals and once bronze medals in European Championship. Not bad for such a small country…
Olympic Games, World and European Basketball Championships are very important events in Lithuania. The victories are celebrated in the streets and in recent years it became popular to put flags on cars to show support for our national team.



Even homeless support Lithuanian team!


As you probably know European Basketball Championship of 2011 will take place in Lithuania. A few days ago EuroBasket Draw ceremony took place in Vilnius and teams were allocated into groups. Lithuanian national team was drawn into group A, which was titled as “group of death” because of strong teams in this group. Let’s hope for the best… It would be very unpleasant to lose at home…
Lithuania is now getting ready for the Championship which will start in August 31. We have not enough arenas suitable for such a big event, so new arenas are still under construction in Kaunas, Klaipeda and Alytus.
Last Saturday the main Lithuanian newspaper “Lietuvos rytas” published an article called “The coming basketball event is getting more expensive”. Yes, we Lithuanians love counting money… The discussions if European Basketball Championship is not too expensive for our country are going on since the beginning of preparation for Championship. Will it pay off? Was it a good idea for us to arrange such an expensive event? How many foreigners it will bring to Lithuania and how much money they will spend here? These are popular questions in Lithuania today.
I believe it is a good idea for us to hold European Basketball Championship. It will be a good publicity for Lithuania. And we will have new modern arenas built. Let’s just hope everything will run smoothly, enough scandals here in Lithuania…

3 comments:

Elvina said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ni said...

We are the best!

Jordan said...

millions. Lithuania is the best in basketball! I love you!