All eyes were on the USA-France men’s basketball Olympic gold medal match at the Paris Games this summer. While some fans were left starstruck by Steph Curry’s dagger threes that helped lift Team USA to a 98-87 win, retired NBA star Joakim Noah viewed the game from a wholly different perspective—that of an older, grizzled Frenchman.
Noah’s diverse background makes him more unique than most, as his father was a French professional tennis player and his mother was crowned Miss Sweden. The former Chicago Bulls All-Star center holds citizenship in three countries but chose to represent France for his international career.
Noah was part of the French team that won silver at the EuroBasket in 2011, but he unfortunately missed his only shot at Olympic action in the 2012 London Games due to injury. Fast forward to over a decade later, and the 39-year-old is liking what he sees from the French men’s national basketball team.
Noah spoke with in an exclusive interview at the U.S. Open on behalf of Emirates, the official global airline partner of the NBA and the first title partner of the Emirates NBA Cup (formerly known as the NBA In-Season Tournament).
“I think it’s great when the best players in the world get on the same stage,” Noah said of the USA-France gold medal game. “Team USA is a team that when they play, the rest of the world watches. I can see the importance of that now that I’m not a player anymore.”
“But for me, I was just looking at it in light of all those young French kids who had the opportunity to watch that big stage game and how much it’s going to inspire the next generation of French athletes,” continued Noah. “When you have an opportunity to play with [Victor] Wembanyama for the next 10 to 15 years, and the talents that we have coming up, there’s something that’s going on in France that they’re doing on the grassroots level that’s working. It’s a small country compared to the U.S., and we have a lot of top talent. So, I think it’s beautiful to see that something in the grassroots system over there in France is working and we have to keep an eye on that.”