Bourges Basketball Team.

When you stroll around town sometimes you can see very tall women. They are at least one head taller than the majority of other women. Sometimes they are slim sometimes they are ‘sturdier’! Often they wear the same tracksuit. No mistake is possible, you see the woman basketball players of the Bourges basketball team. The tallest is 1.97 m tall! For the majority of Berrichon people, we are ‘short’ beside them! Few were born in Bourges and the tall ones often come from abroad where on average people are taller (often former Yougoslavia).
The team is in the first division in France and plays in the European Championships. It plays against Russian, Polish, Italian, Spanish…teams and it is the best sport team in Bourges. Generally, it has good results and was the European Champion a few years ago.
The team is a professional team and of course, the players are paid for that. In France the budget is not very high because this sport is not very newsworthy and so we don’t have big sponsors. In Russia, certain teams have colossal budgets because they have a petrol company as a sponsor! and can afford to pay for example an American player half the total budget of Bourges Basketball.
If you want a good basket team, it is enough to have money…and the salaries are often proportional to the size of the player… (Some “small” players (1.70 m!) earn also a lot of money but they are very good).
In the professional teams (whatever the sport), the results are often in relation with the budget you are able to fund. It is not a question of sport but a commercial business. And as there are a lot of money at stake, this can lead to a drift towards drug-taking, cheating, fighting in stadium… It was not the concept of Pierre de Coubertain (‘reviver’ of the Olympic games at the beginning of the twentieth century) who thought modern sport should be an amateur activity. The poor man if he was able to see what the sport has become “he would be turning in his grave”.

I have never heard of Basketball Teams in England (men or women). Why?

C.B

Merci encore Claude.