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D’This was Victor Wembanyama’s opening ceremony.
No Eiffel Tower, no Celine Dion, no Zinedine Zidane, no Rafael Nadal, no Serena Williams and no floating cauldron required. Just a 7-foot-4 kid with the eyes of the basketball world on him for his Olympic debut.
And he didn’t disappoint.
Lighting a torch of sorts for the French gold-medal hopes, Wembanyama had 19 points, nine rebounds, four steals and three blocked shots, and France opened its run at the Paris Olympics by beating Brazil 78-66 in a Group B game on Saturday before a sold-out crowd of flag-waving, song-singing, wave-doing fans who came looking for a show and got one.
“You can’t underestimate the power of the crowd, the home crowd,” Wembanyama said. “I think it’s really going to be the sixth man for this whole tournament.”
Did he consider this an opening ceremony?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Wembanyama said. “It was way better.”
Wembanyama — the NBA’s rookie of the year for the San Antonio Spurs last season — and his teammates skipped the opening ceremony in Paris on Friday night to rest for their Saturday game. Lille is about an hour from Paris each way by train in ideal circumstances, but the vandalism that disrupted travel on Friday would have only added to the transit time, and being out in a downpour for a few hours probably wouldn’t have been the ideal night-before-a-game plan going into the Olympics.
