Spanish Players Wrecked Their Rooms After Losing Olympic Gold

Some teams at the London Olympics exited their competitions differently than others. Tony Parker, Boris Diaw and Co. on Team France doled out $20,000 for booze for their after party — and the French didn’t even make it out of the quarterfinals. Then there’s Spain. The Spaniards lost for their second straight Olympics to the U.S. in the gold medal game, and even if few gave them more than a puncher’s chance to win missing Ricky Rubio and with several players hurt, Team Spain apparently took the loss very hard. So hard it caused $14,400 in damage.

The New York Daily News reported this item two months in the making on Thursday when it said the Spaniards’ mid-August defeat to the U.S. didn’t exactly usher in your typical check-out from their lodging. The report doesn’t go into detail about the kind of damage to the rooms, but one London official noted that, other than a Moroccan athlete who accidentally wiped out a sprinkler system because of an RC airplane accident he was remotely piloting, this was the “the only incident of hooliganism he had encountered during the sporting event.” Spain paid for the damage on the spot even though the country’s Olympic committee denies the damage ever happened (Might want to tell that to The Guardian, which mentions the damage in its first sentence about a wholly different story).

The exact nature of the damage has not yet been confirmed, but the Spanish media has condemned the actions as “despicable” and “disrespectful”.
And a source within the Spanish Basketball Federation, which has officially denied any knowledge of the vandalism, said: “The leaving parties are usually a regular thing when players finish a tournament. After living together for six weeks, preparing and competing, they have it. But it has never led to this.”

I still think London Olympics officials should have enlisted Nicolas Batum‘s unique brand of citizen justice as punishment.

[Daily News]

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