Paris — If all goes according to plan, Kacie Bosch and Paige Crozon will bid a fond adieu to Paris with 3×3 basketball gold medals and conversational French as cherished souvenirs.
They will have the Plouffe twins to thank — merci, Michelle et Katherine — for both, though Bosch and Crozon most certainly contribute to Canada’s on-court performance. They do not, however, have any game on the linguistic front.
“I would say I’m fourth on the team right now. However, I make up for it in heart,” said Crozon, when asked if she had better command of French than Bosch.
The bilingual and multi-talented Plouffe twins took command of Canada’s opening game of the Olympic women’s 3×3 basketball tournament on Tuesday, putting 18 points on the board and Australia on their heels in a 22-14 walloping.
The one-sided tilt was played at La Place Concorde, the urban park that also hosts breaking and skateboarding and is the temporary, transplanted heart of Paris for the Games.
“This is one of the best venues, if not the most beautiful that we’ve ever been in,” said Bosch. “And the energy at the Olympics is a totally different beast, so it’s so fun to have people from all over the world watching and cheering. Super fun.”
Australia might beg to differ. They didn’t score a point until the game was almost half done, and they were never in it, especially after their aggressiveness got them into foul trouble.
The Canadians, on the other hand, started with a bang. The game was but five seconds old when Michelle drained a two-ball from distance, and Katherine book-ended the twins’ combined 18-point output — 10 for Katherine — with a deuce to finish off the out-matched Australians, 82 seconds before the clock would have run out. In the high-octane half court game of 3×3, it’s the first team to 21 points or whichever one is ahead after 10 minutes of playing time.
Canada led 6-0 and 15-2 and were never threatened, so you have to wonder what the heck happened to the Gangurrus, who have adopted an Aboriginal name for an aggressive east Australian kangaroo. Sure, it was hot, but it wasn’t Outback hot. If anybody was going to melt in waves of 35 Celsius heat and hellacious humidity, wouldn’t it be the western Canadians? The Plouffes are from Edmonton, Bosch from Lethbridge, Alta. and Crozon from Humboldt, Sask.
What’s more, the Australians knocked off Canada not once but twice in an Olympic qualifying tournament in Japan in early May, forcing Canada into the last chance event in Hungary. Obviously, it turned out just fine, and this was Canada’s first shot at vengeance, an emotion so universal it is known by the same word in French and English.
“It was important for us no matter who we played to come out and be aggressive,” said Katherine, “to get the chemistry going, to get the, what’s the word, the yips out, as Paige says.”
The yips is another one of those universal terms. Canada had a bad case of them at the Olympic qualifier in Japan and Australia took advantage. No chance that was going to happen again here. Canada looked sharp, well practised.
“We were ready to rock and roll,” said Michelle. “OK, finally, a game day.”
They have been in Paris for a week, working their tails off, at least when they were not baking baguettes for the entire athletes village. True story. There is a master baker installed in a boulangerie inside the village, and Canada wanted — nay, kneaded— to learn. They ate their wares too, with framboise.
They have also been out and about in the city, with the Plouffes on point, chatting with complete strangers, making the easy connections for which they are rather famous, once you get to know them.
“In terms of speaking the language, it really helps for ordering food around here, talking to people, just being friendly and getting to know the culture here,” said Katherine. “You make a lot of friends when you are open to that.”
Added Michelle: “I’ve been super-grateful that I can speak French to the volunteers, to the people who are working in the village. I think that’s important.”
They are just that nice, that friendly. They are also tall, both are six-foot-three-ish, and they tend to stick out everywhere they go. Complete strangers seem drawn to them, and they are always willing to engage in each of Canada’s official languages. To wit, that time when she was living in a city in the southwest of France, where she was playing pro ball for the local squad.
“I was chatting with a fellow at the market, as I do,” said Katherine. “He asked me my last name and I say Plouffe and he says OK. I see him two months later and he pulls a Wikipedia page out of his pocket and says I looked up your family history and there is a family of Bloufs who came from France. He gave me the Wikipedia page and that was really cool because my gramma had told me a few years ago before she passed that there was in the family tree a Blouf from Germany who came through France and into Canada.”
The Plouffe sisters have also come through France. Together, they played on at least seven, maybe eight professional five-on-five teams across the pond before shifting gears in 2019 to put this incredibly talented 3×3 team together.
“We’ve done a tour de France for sure,” said Katherine.
They will play six more round-robin games in this eight-team tournament, with China up next on Wednesday. The Canadians were ranked No. 5, but that’s a tad preposterous given that FIBA’s individual world rankings have Katherine at No. 1, Crozon No. 2 and Michelle No. 3. They crushed Australia and look ready to roll.
“We were so prepared and so loose, I think, and that combination was just fun,” said Michelle. “We’ve done all the work to get here, we’ve done the preparation, we’ve controlled everything we can control, and now it’s just going out there and playing free and having fun.”