From “I have to carry the flag” to “somehow it will be drawn”: Dennis Schröder has repeatedly spoken out about the opening of the Olympic Games. He has two advantages in the vote – and one major flaw.
For Dennis Schröder, everything was clear very early on when it came to the Olympic flag bearer. At the end of 2023, long before the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) announced the procedure or even individual candidates for the opening ceremony in Paris, the German basketball star said very clearly: “I have to carry the flag! If not now, when?”
Plum, Klopp, Steinmeier and Scholz
The 30-year-old world champion seems to be strongly motivated by the idea of making the next highlight of his career a good ten months after his gold triumph in Manila and becoming the second basketball player after Dirk Nowitzki to lead the German team at the Summer Games. There is indeed a lot to be said for Schröder, who will be received by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier with his teammates this week.
A lot is going ideally for the basketball player, who was far from being a crowd favorite for a long time. His teammates recognize him as the undisputed leader of the world champion team and admire him as “an inspiring personality” (Moritz Wagner).
Presenter Kai Pflaume is promoting him, successful coach Jürgen Klopp is posing for a photo with him in the football stadium. Even before the Olympic trip, which will take him via Berlin and London to Lille and Paris, Schröder is getting ready for the special honour that has been on his mind for several months. On Monday, he capped off a post on his social networks asking people to please vote for him with eight exclamation marks.
“Short fact check” from the DOSB
When Schröder said in March that the DOSB had never contacted him about this and that he believed it was “somehow decided by lot”, even the association reacted. The DOSB publicly sent “a short fact check” to the NBA professional and explained the entire procedure to him, including the nominations and nomination deadlines. True to the motto: Now just calm down.
Since Sunday it has been clear that Schröder is one of the three male candidates for Paris, alongside tennis star Alexander Zverev and sports shooter Christian Reitz. In the election, which runs until July 21, the votes of the fans and those of the athletes will each be weighted at 50 percent.
While Olympic and world champion Reitz has around 1,900 followers on Instagram, Schröder has just over 4.1 million people. Opinions on the Olympic team, however, could be somewhat different. For the women, the options include footballer Alexandra Popp, Olympic equestrian champion Jessica von Bredow-Werndl and judoka Anna-Maria Wagner.
Memories of Nowitzki
Schröder’s Olympic record clearly speaks against him in this position. The basketball player has never actively participated in the games. When his team qualified for Tokyo in 2021, the playmaker was unable to play for insurance reasons. His opponents Reitz (gold in 2016 in Rio and bronze in 2008 in Beijing) and Zverev (gold in singles in 2021 in Tokyo) are highly decorated Olympic participants and are therefore likely to be better known personally to a broader core of the Olympic team than Schröder.
This was also the case in 2008 with flag bearer Nowitzki, who was an internationally celebrated basketball star with the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA, but had never had anything to do with the Olympics before Beijing. “It’s a taboo break,” Nowitzki himself admitted at the time. Because some athletes and former successful Olympic athletes were disappointed, the basketball player publicly apologized. “I don’t want to offend anyone,” said Nowitzki.
Election as a sign against racism?
It is unlikely that we will hear such or similar statements from Schröder in the event of a victory. The procedure has changed over the years and the basketball player himself does not see the selection of the flag bearer only from a sporting point of view.
“To be able to represent Germany like this with my origins, my mum from Gambia, would be enormous. It would make a statement to carry the flag as a dark-skinned person,” said Schröder.
He spoke of “a statement for the German-Africans” and of “a sign against racism”. Long jump Olympic champion Malaika Mihambo, who will not be in Paris for the opening ceremony because of the competition schedule and is therefore not nominated, sees things differently. “It would be about symbolism. Symbolism is nice, but it is not enough. I do not believe that symbolism will save what is currently going wrong,” Mihambo told the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”.
Schröder wants “finally respect”
The basketball players would like to attend the opening ceremony as a group, even though they will be playing their first Olympic game against Japan in Lille at 1:30 p.m. the following day. It will be Schröder’s first competitive game for Germany since September 10, 2023, when he led Germany to World Cup gold in Manila.
“I finally want my respect. I don’t want to hear anything about my name anymore,” Schröder said at the time. When the decision is announced next week, however, he definitely wants to hear his name.
Source: Stern
I am Pierce Boyd, a driven and ambitious professional working in the news industry. I have been writing for 24 Hours Worlds for over five years, specializing in sports section coverage. During my tenure at the publication, I have built an impressive portfolio of articles that has earned me a reputation as an experienced journalist and content creator.
