With a renovated group, Paulo Bassul, new coach of the Brazilian women basketball team, has a complicated mission to classify Brazil to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

 

The 39-year-old new coach will lead for the first time the team to a Pre-Olympic tournament in Valdivia, Chile, which will start this Wednesday, in search of a ticket to Beijing.

 

The winner of this tournament will go directly to Beijing. But Brazil needs to defeat the United States, third place in the 2006 World Championship in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

 

"The group, although it has been renovated, has just been training together," said Bassul who led the Brazilian sub-21 team to a silver medal in the 2003 World Championship.

 

Bassul succeeded to this post left by Antonio Carlos Barbosa. Under the 12 years reign of Barbosa, the Brazilian women basketball team registered frustrating results in the 2004 Athens Olympic Games and in the 2006 World Championship, fourth place after the United States. In the 2007 Rio de Janeiro Pan-American Games, Brazil lost to the United States and finished second.

 

(Xinhua News Agency September 25, 2007)