A photo group, taken just before leaving for Cologne. All together with the great architect of this dream: Giorgio Armani himself. He was the one who sponsored the Olimpia team in 2004, he was the one who bought the club in 2008, an act of love for a city, a team, a sport. He was the one making the group excited by greeting everyone of the members before leaving for an event that Olimpia had been missing since 1992. Back then, the Olimpia group got on a plane to Istanbul, four years after the Ghent triumph. Everyone is now ready for a trip that protocols and marketing, and media commitments, make a very long one. Never during the season, Olimpia traveled on a Tuesday to play on a Friday. This is the case for all the “finalists”. Hoping it will be an auspicious path, Olimpia was the first team, however, to arrive in Cologne, in spite of being the last team to play in its own domestic league, just a few days earlier (CSKA Moscow also played on Monday, just a few hours earlier, Efes had played last Sunday and Barcelona last Saturday). The first difficulty to overcome is this: each team has its own routine, at home and on the road, but not this time. This time everything is different. Even the media coverage will force different rhythms, hypothetical distractions. Routines will be disrupted. Adjusting, responding to new circumstances will be essential.
Olimpia started its day in the gym, consistent with what it has done throughout the season before leaving for a road trip. The team met at 13:00, treatments followed and only the guys scarcely used the night before, or not used at all, had a serious practice. The others used the morning to recover. The team had lunch at the gym, right before embarking on the trip to Malpensa hopping on the Olimpia red bus. There was a variation, since a group of fans decided to say “Good Luck” to the team, chanting, and serenading the players out of the parking lot. A question comes up. How people would have followed Olimpia in Cologne if fans were allowed in the arena?
Cologne is the fourth largest city in Germany in terms of population, it is the most populous in this region, the North Rhine-Westphalia, with a strong Catholic background well represented by the Cathedral, one of the most visited places and a destination site for pilgrimages. Home of one of the oldest universities in Europe, Cologne experienced dramatic moments during the Second World War, when due to evacuations, its population was reduced by 95 percent while the city was destroyed by bombing. Gradually, it was rebuilt, but obviously the urban scenario has changed from the original one. The Final Four are played at the Lanxess Arena, a futuristic venue for the time it was built in 1998. The main indoor sport in Cologne is ice hockey, but the arena has also hosted the European handball championship, and will host them again, soon. It is a facility with potentially over 18,000 of capacity. A pity it cannot be open to the public.
On its way to the hotel, Olimpia’s bus passed next to the arena, built in downtown Cologne, in a very crowdy part of the city. It will be a different Final Four than usual, with no promotional events on-site, everybody is confined between the hotel and the arena that will host also the event’s press conference on Thursday, again different from the usual, split in two between the first and the second semifinal. As soon as the team got to the hotel, the same location for all four teams, there is immediately the first media commitment to honor: a television interview for Coach Ettore Messina and Kyle Hines. They are the most experienced people in this kind of competition. Hines is experiencing the ninth consecutive Final Four, the Coach has been absent from this stage since 2014, but he has been a regular main character 11 times, with four different teams, including Olimpia.
Hines talked a little about the games that launched Olimpia to the Final Four. The Coach is smiling along the way. “Obviously, there’s excitement, we should be proud, all the EuroLeague teams to be able to finish this season, especially thinking back to the first six weeks of this crazy season. Yesterday we played an Italian league playoff game, next thing we do, we jumped on the plane and came here,” he said. Throughout the lobby, there’s Gigi Datome’s image printed on an interview backdrop and when you try to access the elevator a Sergio Rodriguez picture is right there, welcoming you. Finally, the first real test of the event is, in fact, a test: a PCR test, necessary to really start the Final Four. For the Olimpia players and staff it is probably the number 100 or more of this season.
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