the American Brittney Griner, war prize of Moscow
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The atmosphere is festive in the bays of the Saitama Arena, in Tokyo, on this Sunday, August 8, 2021. “You will put some barbecue sauce on me to accompany these thirty pawns”, laughs Brittney Griner, facetious, in front of her partners who congratulate her. The United States women’s basketball team has just won against the Japanese in the final of the Olympic Games tournament.
During this match, Team USA’s strategy was simple: pass the ball to Brittney Griner as a priority and let the latter, from the height of her 2.03 meters, manage alone, in the key and under the opposing basket. Unstoppable. With thirty points inscribed (fourteen successful shots out of eighteen attempted) – a record in the women’s Olympic final – the number 15 has largely contributed to the victory (90-75) and winning a seventh consecutive Olympic title for the United States.
A year has passed. Brittney Griner has, against her will, swapped the prosecution for a prison and the courts. The American basketball player has been imprisoned for almost six months in Russia. In mid-February – a few days before the start of the war in Ukraine – she was arrested at the Moscow airport of Sheremetyevo because of the presence, in her luggage, of cannabis-based vaping liquid, banned in Russia, but legal in many US states.
On Thursday August 4, she was sentenced by the Khimki court, near Moscow, to a nine-year prison term for “possession and drug trafficking”. A decision “senseless”, according to her lawyers, who announced the will of the player to appeal against this judgment.
While Brittney Griner found herself despite herself immersed in the geopolitical crisis between Washington and Moscow, in the midst of the conflict in Ukraine, Russia said to itself “ready” to discuss a prisoner exchange with the United States. “Discussions on the very sensitive subject of an exchange of (prisoners) take place through channels chosen by our presidents”confirmed the director of the North America department at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Dartchiev, in an interview published on Saturday August 13 by the Russian news agency Tass.
college star
At 31, the Texan has been part of the gratin of world basketball for almost ten years. She burst onto the screen in 2013: in her first game as the Phoenix Mercury in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), the North American equivalent league of the NBA for men, she scored two dunks. Until then, only two players had performed this spectacular gesture in a match, which consists of “slamming” the ball, with one or both hands, into the hoop of the basket, then clinging to the latter.
But Brittney Griner’s reputation had begun to emerge a few years earlier. Diana Taurasi, multi-titled American player and future partner of “BG”remembers seeing a video of the high school student “dunking” in 2007. “We said to ourselves: ‘Okay, this is the future of basketball, we may not have a job any longer'”says the latter, quoted by magazine Time, at the end of July.
If Brittney Griner only started playing basketball in high school – she previously played volleyball – she then became a university star in the jersey of the Texas team Baylor. This earned him first place in the “draft” in 2013, this system allowing American franchises to select the best hopes. In 2014, in its second season in the WNBA, the Phoenix Mercury won the national title.
But the aura of Brittney Griner – like that of her multiple tattoos – has gone beyond the parquet floors alone. The player has asserted herself since the beginning of her career as a model. The one who was briefly kicked out of the family home by her father when she announced her homosexuality to him at the end of high school – before reconnecting with him –, assumes her voice as a powerful, black and homosexual woman since the beginning of his career, which is more in a basketball league, which, at its launch in 1997, did everything not to address the issue of sexuality.
“I didn’t want to be one of those athletes who cares so much about their public image that you never really know who they are on the inside. I know who I am “she wrote in her autobiography, published in 2015 (In my Skin. My Life On and Off the Basketball Court, Dey Street Books, untranslated). She who suffered from harassment younger hopes to be able to serve the next generations “who would need an example”.
“The biggest club in the world”
It was while wanting to join the Russian club of Yekaterinburg that the American pivot, double Olympic and world champion with the United States, was arrested in Moscow. If the NBA is a juggernaut of sport, the WNBA does not have the financial scale of its big sister for men. The salaries distributed there are out of all proportion, and the season is disputed in the summer, once the men have left the courts. In order not to remain unoccupied for the rest of the year, most players cross the Atlantic or the Pacific to go and play “overseas” (” abroad “).
As such, the UMMC Yekaterinburg (for Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company, the large metallurgical group to which the team is attached) has a very strong power of financial attraction. Since the 2000s, this mining city in the heart of Russia has become the unofficial world capital of women’s basketball.
If the emoluments offered in Yekaterinburg are higher than those of all the other clubs in the world, the basketball players also find unrivaled working conditions there. On the planet of women’s basketball, Yekaterinburg is the equivalent of Real Madrid or FC Barcelona in football. “It’s nothing less than the biggest club in the worldsummarized, in 2014Frenchman Laurent Buffard, who coached the Russian club. Travel by private plane, the training center and the possibility of playing with the best players, all these conditions are met there. »
“We obviously go there for the experience abroad and for the money. But we are also going there to improve.”reported, at the beginning of May, to washington post, the American Breanna Stewart, partner of Brittney Griner in Yekaterinburg and in the national team. “Every day we trained against the best players in the world”, added the player, who, like the rest of the club’s “foreign legion”, left the Urals in mid-March due to the war in Ukraine.
A pawn in the crisis
Seeing Brittney Griner, one of the best players on the planet, strengthen the foreign contingent of the Russian club in 2015, after two seasons in the Chinese championship, was anything but a surprise. Under the copper jersey of the metallurgical club, the player notably won four Euroleagues – the equivalent of the Champions League in football.
This also led the club’s general manager, Maxim Ryabkov, to testify, alongside the team’s Russian captain and the club’s doctor, in favor of the American player during a pre-trial hearing. “We exposed his great role in the success of the club and in the development of all Russian basketballhe said in mid-June. Thanks to her, we have climbed the European rankings. » This did not influence the verdict.
Although drug laws are very strict in Russia, a foreigner arrested in possession of a small amount – such as the two canisters of cannabis oil found in Griner’s luggage – generally faces a month in prison, a fine and a expulsion. But the war in Ukraine and tensions between Russia and the West have turned the player into a mere pawn in a geopolitical crisis.
The double Olympic and world champion, who pleaded guilty but defended “an honest mistake”implored the court to “not to end [sa] life “. Her conviction paves the way for an exchange of prisoners between the two countries of which she would be a part.
On April 15, 2013, the evening of the “draft” marking the start of her professional career, Brittney Griner was questioned by the ESPN channel about her impatience to “to be able to play with a little more freedom”, after four years in the university yoke of Baylor. His answer had rocketed: “I clearly yearn for freedom. »
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