The final of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will not necessarily remain a good memory for Evan Fournier, especially from a sporting point of view, since the Blues were crucified in the money time by a Stephen Curry in top form (98-87). A match that the new Olympiacos player will “never watch”, he admitted this Sunday on the Stephen Brunch show on RMC. “When you lose finals, you don’t want to go back to them. You want to learn but it’s too painful.”
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“Places are going very quickly”
More than the match, the 31-year-old player was especially disappointed by the special atmosphere in the stands at Bercy, very far from that observed during the quarter against Canada and then in the semi against Germany. The fault is mainly due to the price of tickets to attend the basketball final. “It’s disappointing but it’s not the people’s fault. Tickets went on sale a long time ago, at exorbitant prices,” recalls the French guard. “People who have money around the world say to themselves: ‘this will be the opportunity to go see Stephen Curry, LeBron James, Kevin Durant’ in the Olympic final. I hope they will be there, so I buy my ticket in advance because tickets go very quickly.'”
“The amounts were exorbitant for our families. We had to get tickets, you don’t even realize. For them to have seats, badly placed ones at that, it was 5,000 euros per seat, behind a basket, not even in zone A.”
For Evan Fournier, the ideal would have been to do like the volleyball final – won by the French team – namely, to set affordable prices. Except that the economic reality is quite different. “We would have been at home and it would have been crazy, as was the case for the quarter and the semi. It was a combination of circumstances. We are constantly told that the Olympic Games are for everyone, but that is not the case. It is a business above all. A lot of money is put in place to organize. There has to be money coming in and when you are a major sport like basketball, you pay cash.”
- RMC Sport
