Why is lithuania good at basketball

The world was just a few short months away from cataclysm. But in Lithuania a different kind of defining moment was taking place. For the second time in a row, the tiny nation of 3 million won the biannual EuroBasket tournament, an achievement that proved its athletic prowess was no fluke. That legacy lives on: Today, most dedicated followers of the sport can probably tell you that Lithuanians are really, really good at basketball.

Basketball, first imported by a prominent Lithuanian-American pilot named Steponas Darius, was little more than a loosely organized sport. Things began to change in , when a group of Lithuanian-American basketball players traveled by invitation to their ancestral homeland to bring an element of finesse and organization to the sport.

Officials invited him to Lithuania; for the next three years, Lubin traveled between the United States and Lithuania, imparting his athletic acumen to Lithuanian players. During that time, he taught them the finer details of competitive basketball, setting them up for their first European championship title in Officials even provided a birth certificate claiming Lubin was born in Lithuania in to satisfy the citizenship requirements of the International Basketball Federation FIBA.

With Lubin at the helm, the team squeezed past regional rival Latvia and then trounced every other opponent to handily defeat Italy for the title. But by that time, World War II had broken out — with Lithuania and its neighboring Baltic republics , Latvia and Estonia, soon occupied by the Soviet Union — and the issue was never revisited. Basketball is like a second if not the first religion in Lithuania, and is much more than just a game to the nation.

Cricket 2. Field Hockey 2 Billion 4. Tennis 1 Billion. Lithuanians are among the tallest peoples of the world this maybe explains their affinity for basketball. Artist, film-maker. Opera singer. Anthropologist, environmentalist. Film director. Lithuania is considered a high-income country by the World Bank. Both Lithuania and Poland are affordable countries to visit by European standards, but Lithuania is slightly more expensive than Poland.

It is a Baltic country that has a lot to offer visitors despite its small size. Most visitors to Lithuania head to the capital city of Vilnius.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Which NHL team has the oldest average age? Which NHL team is no longer in existence? Who is the oldest NHL team? What were the first 4 NHL teams?

What NHL teams no longer exist? When did the 7th Table of Contents What is McDavid salary? What is Mcdavids contract? While things changed after the fall of the Soviet Union, basketball still occupied a similar role. Although there was no longer an occupier to resist, the game allowed Lithuania, a small nation that had been tucked behind the Iron Curtain, to make a name for itself on the global stage. Thanks to Lithuanian-Americans, the country learned the rules of basketball and became an early power.

While World War II and Soviet Occupation could have wiped the game out, the opposite happened: Lithuanians saw basketball as their game and used it to assert their own cultural identity.

At that point, things became cyclical. The center, like his father before him , is doing his part to keep Lithuania a hotbed of basketball.