Team players: Belgian Cats provide ultimate alley-oop at Paris 2024 

Generational. Inspirational. Sensational.

The Belgium women’s national basketball team was all that and more at the Olympic Games Paris 2024 – despite not even reaching the podium.

The Belgian Cats came agonisingly close to medalling at their second Olympic appearance, finishing fourth following a narrow 85-81 loss to Australia in the bronze-medal match.

Disappointing? Sure. But the result was also the latest reminder of just how far the Cats have progressed in recent years.

“We showed already for a couple of years that we really belong,” said Team MVP and tournament leading scorer Emma Meesseman ahead of the Games. “But to be a double Olympian, not just once? At the end of [Tokyo 2020], I talked with somebody who was telling me it was never going to happen again, that this was something that was never going to be repeated. And yet here we are four years later.”

In less than a decade, the team has transformed from rank outsiders into serious contenders at global competitions. In 2023 they were crowned European champions for the first time after two bronze-medal performances in 2017 and 2021. At the 2018 and 2022 FIBA World Cups, they placed fourth and fifth, respectively.

A recipient of an Olympic Solidarity Team Support Grant for the 2021-2024 period, the Cats have clearly been putting the funding, and that from the Belgian Olympic and Interfederal Committee (BOIC), to good use.

The support enabled the team to hire a second head coach, ensure the players had access to medical staff year-round, and organise extra preparatory matches ahead of the Games.

Those were the tangibles, the direct benefits to the team. What the Cats gave back in return, the intangibles, had a much more profound impact: inspiring the Belgian Olympic team to its best performance in a century, raising the status of women’s basketball at home and around the world, and contributing to gender equity at the Games, to name but a few.

As one of three teams on the Belgian delegation for Paris 2024, the Cats had a galvanising effect on the entire squad, according to BOIC President Jean-Michel Saive.

“I could see and feel how important it is to have team sports inside the delegation,” said Saive, adding that the country’s Olympians had historically excelled at individual sports. “It brings more dynamic, more self-confidence for the whole team. It really lifts the team to another level.”

It certainly did. Team Belgium went on to claim its most medals at an Olympic Games in 100 years, securing 10 podium finishes at Paris 2024, second only to the 13 it enjoyed at Paris 1924.

Saive added that it was important for the Belgian public and partners to see that the nation is strong in team sports, not just in individual ones.

And the fans are definitely taking notice. At a Paris 2024 qualifier in Antwerp, the Cats pulled in a crowd of 13,700 people, a record for a women’s sports event of any kind in Belgium. Following the Games, they became the first women’s national team to surpass the 10,000-spectator mark in EuroBasket qualifier when they welcomed 10,614 fans to a game against Lithuania in Antwerp.

“The Belgian Cats are a great example of what’s possible when talent, success and support come together at the right time,” said FIBA Europe Executive Director Kamil Novak, who cited the team’s historic EuroBasket triumph in 2023, a generational talent in Emma Meesseman, and a “fun-to-watch brand of basketball” as factors contributing to their popularity.

The Cats also contributed to Paris 2024 becoming the first-ever gender-equal Olympic Games in terms of athletes, while helping Team Belgium close its own gender gap.

The BOIC sent a delegation to Paris that was 49.4 percent women – 85 female athletes and 87 male athletes – an increase from 44.7 percent at Tokyo 2020 and 35.2 percent at Rio 2016.

So, while the Belgian Cats may have fallen just shy of their own goals in Paris, they left the French capital with their heads held high, having delivered a slam dunk in terms of legacy in a number of important areas.