Les Bleues end in style with a victory, this Sunday, June 25, against Hungary (82-68). This success in the game for third place allows the French basketball players to leave Ljubljana with a bronze medal around their necks. A meager consolation after the defeat the day before against Belgium, depriving France of a sixth consecutive final.
Coming for gold in Slovenia, Sarah Michel’s teammates are certainly continuing the fine series of women’s tricolor basketball which climbs to its eighth consecutive continental podium, but is falling back in the hierarchy after five silver medals. At the end of the meeting, after a Marseillaise sung by the French supporters present in the room, the Bleues were able to wish a happy birthday to Sandrine Gruda, who was celebrating her 36th birthday, with a smile.
They thus write one of the longest presences on the podium of a Euro, not far from the nine medals of Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s, but still at a distance from the 22 rank finals (and 21 coronations) of the hegemonic USSR from 1950 to 1991. The metal of the 2023 edition is not as shiny as the silver of 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021 but, as Blue coach Jean-Aimé Toupane pointed out, after the defeat against Belgium in the semi-finals on Saturday evening in the Stozice Arena, the French end with a won match, as was the case at the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2021 against Serbia for the bronze.
After three minutes of observation dominated by Hungary (7-3), the French women took the measure of their opponents to inflict a 23-1 on them, under the impetus of Alexia Chartereau and Migna Touré, and go well ahead to the score after the first ten minutes (26-8).
Hit in the right shoulder seven days ago in a game without stake against Slovenia in the last match of the first round, Iliana Rupert made her comeback, with a bandage, at the end of the first quarter, succeeding in her first three shots, including one three-pointer. The 21-year-old finished the game with 13 points. Les Bleues then managed their lead of around twenty points throughout the game.
The Magyares revived the suspense a little in the last two minutes of the match by returning to nine points (74-65), but Touré, the top French scorer with 20 points, breathed new life into her teammates (80-66 ) with two three-pointers. One year before the Olympic Games at home, French basketball had checked this Women’s Euro as a launching pad towards the supreme deadline.
The management, which has chosen to do without one of its best players, fullback Marine Johannès, taken by its obligations towards its American WNBA franchise, has been able to see the path that remains to be traveled to get a third Olympic podium after silver in 2012 in London and bronze in 2021 in Tokyo. They can also remember that before the exploits of the Braqueuses in London eleven years ago, the France team had already taken bronze at the Euro in 2011.
