Sport
10 December, 2024
High rollers win gold
Stanmore wheelchair basketball player Mitchell Duncan was amongst a star studded Australian team who went undefeated at the International Wheelchair Basketball Federation (IWBF) U23 Men’s Asia Oceania Championships, to secure a spot in the World Championships.
This is the first time Mitchell has been selected to play internationally for Australia, and the team won gold for the first time in over ten years.
Mitchell said he didn’t realise it had been that long, and felt honoured to deliver this result for Australia.
“I thought back to some of the players that had come through and you had to think back to the time you last won it,” he said.
“It’s a very high calibre of players who last won it and it’s nice to be in the same conversation as them.”
Mitchell said he actually felt relief when the team won gold, as the team wanted to stamp their authority on their closest rivals: Japan and Iran.
“Any athlete will tell you qualifiers for a bigger tournament that you ever go to, is harder than winning the bigger tournament itself,” he said.
“Once we got past that relief then the enormity of the situation sort of hit us ten minutes after the game finished and we started to go through the awards ceremony.
“Our goal was to send a message to everyone in our zone, around the world, potentially was to win the entire thing.”
Australia not only won for the first time in over ten years, they also didn’t train together until they arrived in Thailand for the championships.
“We gelled together pretty well all things considered, the entire team as a whole didn’t play together until the day we all arrived,” Mitchell said.
“We had one training session together as an entire team before our first game because two of our guys were playing professionally overseas during our selection camp.
“When you throw in the fact that out of the 12 guys in our team, nine of them had never played international games before including myself, throws in its own new set of challenges.”
Although Mitchell and the team qualified for the World Championships in Brazil next June, they will need to be re-selected. Australia, Japan who won silver, and Iran who won bronze all qualified for the World Championships.
