Staff USA suffered a stunning loss in girls’s 3×3 basketball on the Summer time Olympics in Paris on Monday, and Hailey Van Lith believes the officers are in charge.
Van Lith made an enormous allegation in opposition to the referees following Staff USA’s stunning 18-16 loss to Spain in additional time of the ladies’s 3×3 semifinals. The school basketball star claimed that Spain gamers flopped all through the sport however that the referees “needed the U.S. to lose.”
“This was 1000% BS. These refs needed the U.S. to lose,” Van Lith stated by way of Outkick’s Amber Harding. “They have been flopping left and proper. They don’t seem to be that good. Nice job, girls, we all know who ought to have received.”
Staff USA later defeated Canada 16-13 to win the bronze medal, however they have been favored to win gold.
Van Lith might have felt empowered to bash the Olympic referees after ESPN’s Brian Windhorst stated on “The Pat McAfee Present” Monday that there’s a bias in opposition to the US in 3×3 basketball. Windhorst stated the Olympics make it tough for prime U.S. gamers to qualify for the 3×3 event, which could possibly be a consider why Caitlin Clark didn’t play after the U.S. girls’s basketball group snubbed her.
“There was like 15 hoops that she would have needed to leap via. As a result of FIBA doesn’t care about rankings,” Windhorst stated. “They only care about, like, rising the sport elsewhere exterior the U.S. So it’s not their precedence.”
The idea is that the U.S. is so dominant in 5×5 basketball that the Worldwide Olympic Committee would like one other nation to prevail in 3×3. Whether or not Van Lith subscribes to that concept or not, she believes she and her teammates have been shortchanged this 12 months.
Van Lith is among the prime gamers in girls’s faculty basketball. She introduced earlier this 12 months that she is transferring to a brand new faculty.
