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Nigeria National men’s basketball team, D’Tigers, have been handed a lifeline of playing at the 2024 Olympics scheduled for Paris.
Two defeats from three games during the recent 2023 FIBA World Cup qualifiers in Abidjan left Nigeria in a precarious position. With Nigeria not yet guaranteed a place at next year’s World Cup in Japan, Indonesia and Philippines, an outing in Paris had seemed out of reach.
But with the new rule, even if they do not make the 32-team World Cup, D’Tigers will still have an opportunity to reach the 2024 Olympics going by the latest FIBA rule.
Prior to the new rule, teams that qualified for the last eight of the World Cup were guaranteed a place at the Olympics, while others would have to battle it out for a slot in another set of qualifiers.
However, a statement on the FIBA website indicated that Nigeria, top-ranked basketball country in Africa, still stood a chance to slug it out in the newly introduced Olympics qualifying tournament.
“While most of the teams going to the Olympics will do so with their performances at the World Cup, as happened when teams booked their places in China 2019 for the Tokyo Games, there will still be a path to Olympic qualification, thanks to the newly introduced pre-OQTs that will offer tickets for the OQTs,” the website read.
