If there are no restrictions on the pandemic in September 2025, Latvia can hope to make a profit by hosting the final of the European Championship. The state is ready to invest about ten million euros, Riga municipality – one and a half million.
Photo: LBS
Ilmārs Stūriška, “Latvijas Avīze”, JSC “Latvijas Mediji”
Call Putin 15 times a day and grows stubble like Zelensk. What’s going on with Macron?
“The Russians are guarding those factories!” Rajev reveals important details about the occupiers’ attack on Mariupol
By Empty store shelves in Latvia should not worry, but a much bigger problem may arise
Read other news
As could be expected, Latvia has acquired the right to organize the 2025 European Basketball Championship single-group tournament and also the final stage. The winners of the medals in the men’s competition in Latvia will be determined for the second time in history, the first was in 1937.
The organizers of the 2025 European Championship were announced yesterday at the board meeting of the International Division of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) in Munich, Germany. There was practically no competition this time – only Latvia, which has been destroyed by the Russian occupation forces for more than a month, was competing for the final stage, but there were only three applicants for four group tournaments.
The group’s tournament will also take place in Finland and Cyprus, but for the fourth sextet, FIBA is ready to wait until Ukraine in November, while working on Plan B. The Ukrainian delegation did not attend the meeting in Munich for obvious reasons.
In 2015, one group competition of the European Championship took place in Riga. Latvia hosted two groups for women in 2019, and the entire championship – ten years before that. It should be noted that, including the youth championships, the Latvian Basketball Union has organized more than ten FIBA tournaments since 2007.
Edgars Šneps, a member of the board of FIBA’s European division, told Latvijas Avīze that the voting took place in secret and the number of votes has not been disclosed for a long time: “Lawyers count, the president announces the result. How the situation is approached was conceptually decided at the board meeting on Monday. ”
What was discussed in it?
E. Šneps: All countries had their own problems, we discussed the situation in Ukraine. What was important before was what was said in a narrower circle: whether the European area wants to decide everything now or leave the door open, including for the final stage. The prevailing position was that decisions should be made about everything that is possible now, because people have done their homework and are not to blame that someone else could not or did not want to.
Secondly, there are many unknowns and uncertainties in these times, so every thing you can be sure of has value. 23 people took part in the board, and the comments made there confirmed what was said before, so the position was quite unified.
So this narrowest circle actually indicates which direction to go?
It is in any organization with a sufficiently large decision-making body. In basketball, there is an instrument such as the Coordination Board, which has three representatives from the FIBA head office and three from the European division. Its platform is also enshrined in the statutes and they have a say before board meetings. I am not there, but I have spoken to most of the representatives.
You mentioned that 23 members of the board decided, but there are 25. So there were no representatives of Russia and Belarus?
No.
Why aren’t they excluded from the board?
There has been no such proposal. The FIBA Executive Committee has decided to suspend the teams and teams, but all other issues related to the situation in Ukraine will be addressed at the next board meeting in May, when the General Assembly will also be in place. I assume that there is a desire to make this a common decision of the entire European basketball community. Or there was no desire to confuse the issues, this time the focus was on Eurobasket 2025.
How is it assessed that Russia is still not excluded from this year’s European Championship?
Very negative.
Why has FIBA acted so cowardly and slowly on Russia? The first message of condemnation of war appeared on the fifth day after it began.
I would not say that FIBA tried to avoid it. At the moment, everything can be decided relatively quickly online, but it is not a one-man decision. FIBA is a global organization and, even with a minimal composition, has representatives from all continents.
I admit that it was not possible to gather at once, maybe other continents have a different vision, maybe it took hard facts to understand what was going on. If the representative of Latvia were asked for an opinion on the escalation in other regions of the world, it is very likely that the blow could not be said either. That’s just my guess.
FIBA has an influence on the people of Greece, Serbia, the president of the European chapter Turgai Demirel is from Turkey, so the political picture is quite definite. Can’t the representatives of the Baltic States, Poland and other countries who have a good understanding of the reality of Russia unite and facilitate decision-making?
Very likely. I had communication with Alexander Volkov, a former player of the National Basketball Association and the President of the Ukrainian Basketball Federation, and he had sent a picture of his board with a machine gun and a pistol in one of the country’s regions. We all owe it to him to be fighting there. Consequently, there was a joint vote that Ukraine would have the opportunity to compete in the 2025 group championship tournament.
Themes
