The French women's basketball team has spent the last four months rehearsing the only two defeats Team USA has ever suffered in an international final, and on Sunday it will attempt to reproduce both of them in a single game, according to a training plan filed with the French Basketball Federation.
Coach Jean-Aimé Toupane has divided his roster into two units. The first, called the Moscow Group, will play the first half exactly as the 1980 Soviet team did. The second, the Leningrad Group, will play the second half as the 1986 Soviet team did. At halftime the entire squad will swap jerseys in the tunnel, a maneuver the federation has practiced eleven times in Bourges with a stopwatch and a full military band.
«We are not trying to beat the Americans,» Toupane said. «We are trying to make them lose in the only two ways they have ever lost. If we do it correctly, they will recognize the pattern and become confused.»
The town of Bourges has sent 3,000 residents to the arena, each carrying a printed diagram of the 1980 final. The mayor has renamed the town square Place du Deux Fois, and the local bakery has begun selling a pastry shaped like a Soviet basketball hoop.
Team USA has not commented, but a person close to the delegation said the players have been watching the 1980 tape on a loop since Thursday and have started referring to the French bench as «the archive.»