A conversation about Eurobasket 1987

Greece’s victory at the 1987 EuroBasket tournament is one of the most important moments in the country’s modern history. In the midst of the 1987 summer heatwave, Greeks realized – warily at first, then with the abandon of first love – that basketball is a sport that can make them feel and express emotions they’d never felt before. In that communal way that only sport offers, the emotional ups and downs of an entire nation traced the trajectory of a ball flying towards a net. How much of it do we remember 30 years on? How much has changed in Greek society since then? Where is the ball that was used in the final now? And what was playing on the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation’s second television channel (ERT2) during the decider?

Players key to Greece’s EuroBasket 1987 victory meet again on the Onassis Stegi Main stage, to look back and reminisce about the past with a smile. Players of the Greek national basketball team open up to Vassilis Skountis and Dimitris Theodoropoulos about the importance of their victory, the impact they had on popular culture, and the emotions that sometimes need the passing of 30 years before they can be expressed. Players from the next generation of Greek basketball are also on hand to explain the important knock-on effects of that moment in 1987, while extracts taken from news reports on the social and political realities of the time help reconstruct the broader landscape of a moment that may have been sporting in nature, but nevertheless had such a powerful effect on Greek society that it can only really be appraised 30 years after the event, one afternoon in the center of Athens.