Boomers in precarious position heading into Paris Olympic Games with expectations of gold

At a team-bonding culture night before the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games, Australia’s men’s basketball team was shown historical footage of their previous campaigns, and it wasn’t all glittering.

For as much pain as the Boomers endured in the 2010s before breaking through for their famous bronze, Australian basketball fans had seen this movie before.

Sparked by the NBL’s boom years in the 1980s, the Boomers reached the Olympic semifinals in 1988, 1996 and 2000, albeit missing out on a medal every time.

As the generation of Luc Longley, Andrew Gaze, Mark Bradtke and Andrew Vlahov grew grey and old, the days of falling agonisingly short of medals started being looked back on as the glory years.

In 2001, the Boomers missed out on World Cup qualification when they lost to rivals New Zealand for just the second time in their history, kicking off a dark period for the team.

They finished ninth at the 2004 Olympics in Athens — their worst finish since the 1972 Munich Olympics — and couldn’t get past the quarters at Beijing 2008 and London 2012.

“The balance of a national team, you want to win now, but you’ve also got to look for the next tournament and the tournament after and make sure you have a core group staying together,” Andrew Bogut said in Rose Gold, a new ABC TV documentary on the Boomers.

“That’s what went out the window after 2000 [when] nine or 10 of our best players retired.”

The pain was tempered by the success of the Opals, who picked up medals at five straight Games from Atlanta to London, including three successive finals in Sydney, Athens and Beijing.

But with the women’s team more than a decade removed from their last Olympic medal, the Boomers can’t afford another slip.

They seem to have learned from the mistakes of the past, but turning theory into practice isn’t always so simple, as the Boomers’ past and present stars made painfully clear in the new documentary.

‘Someone should do a case study on the Boomers’

There are a lot of stereotypes about basketball players carved along racial lines.

Black American players are the most recognisable faces of the sport, admired and vilified in any number of ways.

White Americans are spot-up shooters, European players are slow and soft, and Aussies are hard-nosed, pass-first players.

Of course, this is all nonsense — for every person who plays into those stereotypes, there are plenty who buck them.

And Australia has come a long way from the days of Lauren Jackson, Gaze and Longley being the only basketballers associated with the green and gold.

The leader of the Boomers is a rapid, sharp-shooting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander man who was one of the most trusted members of an NBA championship squad.

Ingles looks more like Hamish Blake than Blake Griffin.

The team’s first NBA star, Bogut, was a skilled 7-foot-tall number one draft pick born to Croatian immigrants who “grew up being called a ‘wog'” and has on multiple occasions courted controversy with now-deleted Twitter activity.

“We’ve got a group of people from different backgrounds and upbringings. Sometimes they’ll disagree heavily on things politically, culturally [and religiously],” Bogut said.

“[We’re] a melting pot of people and that’s what Australia should be about, getting along and having one common goal.”

The future of the team is in the hands of a group varied enough to include NBA heart-throb Josh Giddey (dubbed NBA Chalamet), country Victoria boy Jock Landale, South Sudanese-Australian Duop Reath, and the sons of Americans who came to Australia to play basketball in the 1990s and 2000s, like Dante Exum, Ben Simmons and Josh Green.

US-born NBA cult hero Matisse Thybulle’s father was an engineer from Haiti and his mother was a successful naturopathic doctor. They named him after French post-impressionist painter Henri Matisse.

This generation is the embodiment of what Bogut spoke about. A powerful reminder that multiculturalism is Australia’s greatest strength and that recognising and understanding another person’s culture does nothing but add to the collective.

But of course, it’s not that simple, and there were some worrying signs when we got a glimpse of the future at this year’s World Cup.

Rocky road back to the mountaintop

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A 10th-placed finish on the back of losses to eventual champions Germany and the Slovenians who they beat to bronze in Tokyo hearkened back to the grim post-2000 decline.

At the Olympics, centre Aron Baynes’s absence due to a neck injury was covered ably by Landale, who earned himself an NBA contract with his impressive performances.

But when Landale went down with an ankle injury on World Cup eve, Australia’s lack of depth was exposed.

Reath was the only centre on the roster and Ingles had his least productive tournament in years as he was forced to play above his weight class.

Meanwhile, for the first time since 2006, Mills wasn’t the top scorer for the Boomers at a major international tournament.

That honour went to Oklahoma City Thunder star Giddey, who is a more than capable replacement, but we don’t yet know how he gels with fellow point guards like Exum, Dyson Daniels and maybe even Simmons.

Coach Brian Goorjian said after the World Cup that the team needed to be ready for some teething pains as the focus shifted away from the ageing Mills and Ingles.

“I knew … that I’d have to do some nasty stuff and we’d be in a position of change,” Goorjian said.

“It’s not just five new guys: it’s major pieces.”

And the likes of Mills, Ingles and Matthew Dellavedova are aware as well, reminding the upcoming generation of that fact even in the immediate afterglow of the Tokyo triumph.

“This shit is not that easy,” Thybulle said he was told after striking bronze on his first international excursion in 2021.

Ingles and Mills have made clear they still have dreams of gold at next year’s Paris Olympics.

But — be it after gold, silver, bronze or something more disappointing — they will want to anoint the next leaders of the Boomers as happened for them after London 2012.

The good news for them is that it won’t be down to one or two guys.

Thanks to the rich history and culture they’ve helped create, every Boomer has a complete understanding of how rough the dark days were and how desperately they should avoid them.

And, perhaps most importantly, they have the skill and passion to make “gold vibes only” more than just a slogan.

Stream Rose Gold on Tuesday, November 14 at 8.30pm on ABC TV or catch up any time on ABC iview.