Manuel Sanchez Gomez |
Vienna (EFE) one of the most dynamic and cheap sports on the scene.
This is how Álex Sánchez, director of 3×3 at FIBA, explains it, who sits down to speak with EFE in the Austrian capital to highlight the virtues of a sport that has gone from zero to being Olympic in little more than ten years and that already He has eight world championships behind him.
“When we started in 2010 I wanted this to be Olympic and nobody gave a penny for it. It would have to be studied, because all this has happened in record time”, explains Sánchez, who fulfilled his dream in 2021, when 16 teams, eight for boys and eight for girls, participated in the Tokyo Games.
However, now the objective is to increase the number of participants, because eight are still few for a sport that only involves four players per team. In fact, Marta Canella, a player for the Spanish team, assured that the reduced number of teams in the Games means that there is a higher level in the World Cups, Europeans and even in the qualifiers.
“We are the only ball or ball sport that does not have twelve or more players, it is nonsense, it is not understood. Perhaps it is because it is a new sport, but we are already in talks with the IOC to expand it for Los Angeles 2028”, Sánchez admitted.
For this rapid rise of the sport, which is played with a single basket, with a DJ playing music in the background and in ten-minute matches, the key has been the connection with the young fan and adaptation to new technologies. While other sports such as soccer and tennis debate their historical rules, due to the loss of audience interest, 3×3 opts for dynamism.
“We greatly simplified the rules to make it attractive to all audiences. Another thing we did was bet on ‘streaming’ from the outset. In 2012 or 2013 almost no one did it and we seemed crazy, but it was much easier than programming on television. Social media is in our DNA. We cut out the middleman and connect directly with the audience, without having to convince anyone that we deserved a place on the grid”.
Vienna is the eighth stop of the World Cup, after passing through the Philippines, Greece, China and Belgium, among other places, and brings together forty teams, twenty men’s and twenty women’s. “From the first moment we were obsessed with making it together. We made it a mandatory standard”, says Sánchez, who also praises the sustainable commitment of the event, with recyclable materials and without plastics, and how cheap it is.
“This is black leg and it costs between one and two million to organize it. It’s cheap if we compare it with any other World Cup in another sport, for example ‘beach volleyball’, which costs you eight million for a world championship. The advantage is that the ratio of entertainment or added value, compared to the cost, is very high”.
One of Sánchez’s objectives is that in the future Spain can host a world championship, especially after Spain, in the women’s category, was proclaimed world champion in 2021, in addition to having achieved two silver medals in 2017 and 2019.
“It would be a hit. It is only necessary to find a promoter who wants to do it and that the Federation is interested in it. In Spain there have been World Cups, Europeans, U18, U17, U21… Which are much more expensive than what we are talking about here. There is no reason not to do it”, points out Sánchez.
2023-06-02 07:53:16
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