Sunday night marked a historic occasion for Belgium's national female basketball team, the Belgian Cats, as they became European champions.
Belgium became European women's basketball champions for the first time in their history on Sunday evening in Ljubljana, when the team beat four-time European champions Spain 64-58 in the final after eliminating France in the semi-finals and cup holders Serbia in the quarter-finals.
Overall, the 39th edition of the tournament was a success for the Belgian Cats, as they were unbeaten, winning all six of their matches, and they set a new record for the number of assists in a Euro match (37).
"The slogan of the tournament is 'Dare to dream', but beforehand we never dared to dream of winning the EC like this," player Emma Meesseman confessed afterwards.
Belgium's Emma Meesseman celebrates the team's win. Credit: Belga / Virginie Lefour
However, on Sunday night, the team limped behind Spain throughout the match, shedding hopes of a victory. But thanks to a turn in the team's game, which saw several clever three-pointers being scored, the players still turned the lopsided situation around in extremis, resulting in a historic first European Championship win.
Team victory
The team has now qualified for the pre-Olympic tournaments next February with a view to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
The Belgian Cats also placed three players in the best five of the Euro: Emma Meesseman, Julie Allemand and Julie Vanloo, who was also crowned midfielder MVP of the tournament and became the first player in history to record a triple-double in a Euro match (against the Serbs in the quarter-finals). She is the tournament's top scorer.
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While this marks the first-ever win for the Belgian women's team, they have previously won two bronze medals at the 2021 European Championships in Valencia and in 2017 in Prague.
At the World Cup in Sydney last year, they finished fifth, after an earlier fourth-place finish in Tenerife in 2018. The 2021 Games were a disappointment with a seventh-place finish and a narrow loss against host Japan in the quarter-finals.
