Lausanne, May 5th 2022
Team Lausanne 3x3 is aiming for the Paris Olympic Games in 2024 and begins the season on the world basketball tour with a fabulous and unprecedented 9th place in the world ranking.
After staying in the top 25 of the world rankings for the past five years, the Swiss players will start the season with a record ranking. Indeed, they will attack 2022 as ninth best team in this world ranking.
Today, the Lausanne team that shines on the FIBA World Tour also has the mission of bringing Switzerland to the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024.
And, as if the World Tour circuit and the objective of the Olympic Games were not enough, Team Lausanne 3x3 is preparing the first Swiss 3x3 basketball arena in the Halles Nords de Beaulieu, in Lausanne.
On May 10th 2022, Team Lausanne will fly to Japan, more specifically to the city of Utsunomiya located two hours from Tokyo. This will be the first of fourteen stops on the FIBA 3x3 World Tour 2022.
The Team
The Lausanne team is still made up of its three Swiss founders, not three guys from Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden but one from Zurich, a Ticinesi and a Vaudois. The combination of Marco Lehmann, Westher Molteni and Gilles Martin is exotic and represents the three linguistic regions of Switzerland.
The World Tour 2022
The three Swiss will be able to benefit from their best ranking at the start of this 2022 season and intend to earn a place in the famous Top 8. A place in this Top 8 in December 2022 would guarantee the team automatic qualification for three stages of the World Tour for the pre-Olympic season in 2023. The trio is more motivated than ever by the fact that Badara Top from Lausanne and the Nyonnais Christophe Varidel, former university star at Florida Gulf Coast University, complete the team. The maximum squad authorized by FIBA is six players and the Lausanne residents have promised a big surprise for the 6th and last member of the team. To be continued in early August 2022.
The Olympic Games in sight
The road to qualification for the 2024 Olympic Games is demanding. Only eight nations will be represented in Paris. To select them, the ranking takes into account the addition of the points earned by the twenty-five best players in the country. At the moment, Switzerland is 12th in this world ranking. The fact that Lausanne 3x3 brought 80% of these precious points to the country, it is understandable how essential their participation in tournaments is. Without them, the country would fall back to the bottom of the rankings, seeing Olympic hopes melt away in the sun.
Closer to home
Since competitions and sporting prospects are not enough for the three friends, they are still in the process of carrying out a magnificent basketball hall project in Lausanne. A hall dedicated to 3x3 basketball: "It's a premiere in Switzerland and a childhood dream," enthuses Gilles Martin, co-founder of the project. The purpose of this hall is to facilitate access to the practice of basketball in the broad sense, with a 3x3 specificity, as well as to provide a place of sporting life for children and young people from Vaud in Lausanne. The 1000m2 hall is already used for training by the Lausanne professional team and should open its doors to the public during the summer.
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Contact: merci@lausanne3x3.ch, +41 78 814 33 45