B.C. didn’t have a player named Tuesday to the Canadian women’s Olympic basketball team for Paris 2024 but the Island was running a victory lap just the same. Victoria served as the team’s springboard to Paris following a training camp at UVic’s CARSA Gym and the national side’s lone pre-Olympic exhibition game in Canada.
“It’s been an exciting few weeks here, culminating in beating our own record,” said Nick Blasko, COO of Friends of Victoria Basketball, which organized the Victoria camp.
He was referring to world No. 5-ranked Canada defeating No. 46 Portugal 91-65 in the exhibition tune-up for Paris before 5,015 fans last week at Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre. The crowd was the largest to watch the women’s national team play in Canada, breaking the previous record of 4,549, set last year at the Memorial Centre to watch Tokyo Olympic silver-medallist Japan beat Canada 80-60 in a game to get Canada ready for Paris Olympic qualifying.
“We put 5,000 people inside in June on a Wednesday,” said Blasko, proudly.
Canada also played Portugal, which did not qualify for the Olympics, two more times at the Memorial Centre in closed-door sessions through last weekend. Next stop will be exhibition games in Belgium and Spain before opening the Olympic tournament against host France on July 29 at 50,186-capacity Stade Pierre-Mauroy in Lille.
The Victoria camp got them ready for that.
“It’s a beautiful city and we [did] a lot of team activities here and got to spend time with each other in a great environment,” said Canadian player Yvonne Ejim of Calgary, out of the NCAA Gonzaga Bulldogs, and the lone player from Western Canada named to the Olympic team.
“We [got] comfortable with each other, understanding our strengths and our weaknesses.”
Fifteen players were in the Victoria camp, of which eight made the Olympic team, including Ejim. The others are forward Natalie Achonwa, going to her fourth Olympics, and point-guard Syla Swords, going to her first as the youngest player ever to play for Canada in the Olympics at 18. They will be joined out of the Victoria camp by Kayla Alexander, Nirra Fields, Laeticia Amihere, Shay Colley, Sami Hill and Cassandra Prosper.
Canada’s four WNBA players — Kia Nurse, Bridget Carleton, Aaliyah Edwards and Laeticia Amihere — will join the national team in Europe when the WNBA shuts down for the Olympic break.
The Canadian women will be in Group B at the Olympics, and after opening against host France on July 29, they will play Australia on Aug. 1 and Nigeria on Aug. 4. The group stages will be played in Lille and the playoff rounds at the Bercy Arena along the Seine in downtown Paris.
While the Canadian men have finally qualified for the Olympics in basketball for the first time since 2000 in Sydney, when captained by Steve Nash of Victoria, the Canadian women have been regulars in the Summer Games as quarter-finalists at both London 2012 and Rio 2016 before placing ninth at the last Olympics in Tokyo.
