Group USA suffered a stunning loss in ladies’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 towards the referees following Group USA’s stunning 18-16 loss to Spain in extra 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 via Outkick’s Amber Harding. “They had been flopping left and proper. They don’t seem to be that good. Nice job, women, we all know who ought to have gained.”
Group USA later defeated Canada 16-13 to win the bronze medal, however they had 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 is a bias against the United States in 3×3 basketball. Windhorst stated the Olympics make it tough for high U.S. gamers to qualify for the 3×3 match, which could possibly be a think about why Caitlin Clark didn’t play after the U.S. ladies’s basketball staff snubbed her.
“There was like 15 hoops that she would have needed to soar via. As a result of FIBA doesn’t care about scores,” Windhorst stated. “They only care about, like, rising the sport elsewhere exterior the U.S. So it’s not their precedence.”
The speculation is that the U.S. is so dominant in 5×5 basketball that the Worldwide Olympic Committee would favor one other nation to prevail in 3×3. Whether or not Van Lith subscribes to that idea or not, she believes she and her teammates had been shortchanged this yr.
Van Lith is without doubt one of the high gamers in ladies’s faculty basketball. She introduced earlier this yr that she is transferring to a new school.