The atmosphere is festive in the bays of the Saitama Arena, in Tokyo, on this Sunday, August 8, 2021. “You will put some barbecue sauce on me to accompany these thirty pawns”, laughs Brittney Griner, facetious, in front of her partners who congratulate her. The United States women’s basketball team has just won against the Japanese in the final of the Olympic Games tournament.
During this match, Team USA’s strategy was simple: pass the ball to Brittney Griner as a priority and let the latter, from the height of her 2.03 meters, manage alone, in the key and under the opposing basket. Unstoppable. With thirty points inscribed (fourteen successful shots out of eighteen attempted) – a record in the women’s Olympic final – number 15 largely contributed to the victory (90-75) and to the winning of a seventh consecutive Olympic title for the United States.
A year has passed. Brittney Griner has, against her will, swapped the prosecution for a prison and the courts. The American basketball player has been imprisoned for almost six months in Russia. In mid-February – a few days before the start of the war in Ukraine – she was arrested at the Moscow airport of Sheremetyevo because of the presence, in her luggage, of cannabis-based vaping liquid, banned in Russia, but legal in many US states.
On Thursday August 4, she was sentenced by the Khimki court, near Moscow, to a nine-year prison term for “possession and drug trafficking”. A decision “senseless”, according to her lawyers, who announced the will of the player to appeal against this judgment.
While Brittney Griner found herself despite herself immersed in the geopolitical crisis between Washington and Moscow, in the midst of the conflict in Ukraine, Russia said to itself “ready” to discuss a prisoner exchange with the United States. “The discussions on the very sensitive subject of an exchange of (prisoners) take place through channels chosen by our presidents”confirmed the director of the North America department at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Dartchiev, in an interview published on Saturday August 13 by the Russian news agency Tass.
college star
At 31, the Texan has been part of the gratin of world basketball for almost ten years. She burst onto the screen in 2013: in her first game as the Phoenix Mercury in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), the North American equivalent league of the NBA for men, she scored two dunks. Until then, only two players had performed this spectacular gesture in a match, which consists of “slamming” the ball, with one or both hands, into the hoop of the basket, then clinging to the latter.
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