From our Olympics correspondent in Paris – France surged through to the men’s basketball finals Thursday night after a hard-fought victory over Germany that had Paris’s Bercy Arena incandescent with joy. Les Bleus will be fighting the US team for gold on Saturday after the Americans clawed back a desperate victory of their own from the dominating Serbian team.
As the two pre-eminent powers of continental Europe, France and Germany have fought three all-out wars in the past century and a half, give or take a few years. As the German men’s basketball team surged ahead in the first quarter of the semi-finals against France on Thursday night in Paris’s Bercy Arena, a fresh outbreak of hostilities didn’t seem altogether out of the question.
