“The first days in the games we were the ones who asked for photos because no one knew us in quotes. Once we began to compete people began to hook us a lot and the 3×3. There were people who wrote to me to tell me that someone had told them that they had seen me, “he says Sandra Ygueravide (Valencia, 1984). Last summer The Spanish team won the silver medal of this basketball modalityOlympic from Tokyo (2021) and booming. It has just retired from the normal basketball After a brilliant career of more than two decades, but it will continue “Enjoying” In 3×3: a sport that made it Olympic at age 39 and that has given her “New roads”. “The medal is stored at home. I have half hidden to protect her. I have not had it at any time. I prefer to have her hidden in case they enter to steal at home, “he acknowledges with a laugh. It also treasures four European medals: two gold For the medals this Sunday.
Sandra Ygueravide. / Provided
The first World Cup was in 2012 in Athens. The Spanish Federation received an invitation, but the discipline was so, so new that there was no team. “They had to do a team in a hurry and took Four retirees: Garbajosa, Carlos Jiménez, Lucio Angulo and I “laugh James Comas (Premià de Mar, 1974), a base that played more than 130 games in the ACB with Lleida. He returned to Athens eight years after playing the Olympic Games with Pau Gasol, Juan Carlos Navarro and company. “We were totally novice and we found countries that took very good teams and specific 3×3 players.”he adds. They added almost 1,600 games in the Spanish league, but they ended up exhausted because it is “3×3 is a lot of effort, much, much more beast. You can't even breathe. Because there is no defensive balance. You pass to defend in half tenth“. The 3×3 is played with half track and the two teams alternate in attack and defense. The games end when 21 points are reached or when ten minutes are turned on time. Basketball games 5×5 They last 40 minutes on time stopped: about two hours.
Comas is responsible for 3×3 of the Catalan basketball federation. Emphasize growth “brutal” of the modality and specifically of the circuit organized by the Federation since 2017-2018: “This year we are bursting it. Before we closed the inscriptions two or three days before and now it is eight or nine days before. Because we do not fit. We could reach 200 teams or more, but the competition is a day and space and time are what they are,”. The first four tests of the eighth edition have dynamited records: more than 600 PREMINI to Senior and 150 teams in Badalona, Torelló, Llinars del Vallès and Vilafranca del Penedès.
Last year
His goal is to play 3×3 “throughout the year”. It is an easier and accessible sport for spaces of space, half track, and players and has the addition “spectacular” that contribute the clues: they are usually installed in the most beautiful or emblematic places of the cities. The Paris Games track was in Trocadero, the best viewpoint of the Eiffel Tower. Is exploiting at all levels because it is “More fun for the player because the ball already has a difference from other sports such as football or basketballs, all players are important and protagonists” And because it is “More attractive and dynamic for the spectator”.
Ygueravide points out that “It is the perfect sport for dynamism and immediacy”for today's world. Guim Expósito (Cerdanyola, 1994), a male team player, states that 3×3 “It coincides a lot with current consumption habits. In the series or Netflix movies everything happens much faster than in those that were done before”. Before I played 5×5 basketball: “You once took people around a game and from the track you saw that it was bored or that it was with the mobile all the time. When you took someone to watch a 3×3 flip match because things are always happening. Every ten seconds happen highlights“. A few days ago they made history with Barcelona 3×3: the first Spanish team that arrives at the semifinals of a world circuit test. They are on the 24th step of the ranking.
Guim Expósito. / Provided
In 2021 Expósito stopped dedicating himself professionally to 5×5 basketball. Fed up with “survive” with contracts of one thousand euros and eight months because with 27 years it no longer compensated and to build “A future at a living and work standard”. He had competed in the second and third division: many times they went and returned by bus on the same day of the game and slept on the ground, in a mat or an inflatable mattress. This year he has played 3×3 in Austria, Holland, Mongolia and China. Last year, in Bahrain, Canada, Japan and Singapore. They do not live from 3×3 and have their work, but this discipline allows greater flexibility and teams tend a lot to self -management.
Savor the luck of having agreed over time with the “eye” of 3×3. Of being a summer party sport in villages and neighborhoods to give birth to “This world”: A sport “Professionalized” e “interconnected “ with international circuit and ranking that has grown and continues to grow “A barbarity”.
