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The 2013 EuroBasket Champions were the 10th team holding the cup and since 1995 the trophy was lifted in the air by basketball greats like Vlade Divac, Aleksander Djordjevic, Gregor Fucka, Dejan Bodiroga, Sarunas Jasikevicius, Theodoros Papaloukas, Andrei Kirilenko, Pau Gasol, Juan Carlos Navarro etc.
In order to discover something more about the Championship, we had the honor to speak with Director of EuroBasket 2013, Aleš Križnar.
EuroBasket is the biggest European basketball event, which attracts the biggest European basketball stars and lots of fans from every corner of Europe to the host country and has great media coverage in almost every corner of the world. This year’s event is also the biggest sporting event in Slovenia since it’s independence and that is also why we are so proud to have an opportunity to host it this year.
Despite being a small country, Slovenia is known for its outstanding basketball tradition. Our national team has been amongst the strongest in Europe since our independence and our fans are known as one of the best, not only in our region, but the whole Europe. As a nation we love and live basketball. Besides this sporting view, there are also other reasons, such as the central European location of our country and successful organization of various FIBA Europe events, that FIBA Europe recognized and that gave them a feeling that we deserve to be the hosts of this event.
Since we really wanted to be ready for this big event, our preparations began immediately after we received the honor to organize the event. So the preparations have been going on for almost three years and we prepared excellently for the event, which was successful in every aspect. There are more than 5,000 people involved in the organisation of the event, having calculated LOC, its assistans, security guards, policemen, volunteers, side events personnel etc.
EuroBasket will, the same as every other big sporting event, raise the level of knowledge of the people about Slovenia and place it on European map. During the EuroBasket we hosted many fans from various countries, not only those nearby, but even from Scandinavia. I am convinced that they were thrilled about the hospitality of Slovenian people and the beauty of our small country, that has a lot to offer to the visitors and that they will take a nice picture of Slovenia into the world and return someday even themselves.
Even after the end of the event we can hardly realise how big success this event was. 330,000 fans, that visited the games, more than 182,000 tickets sold, more than 55,000 foreign guests and tv coverage in as many as 167 countries of the world are just a few fact that emphasize the importance of the event. However, the 
biggest satisfaction to us is the joy of a large crowd of basketball fans which showed their support to Slovenian basketball after claiming the fifth place at the tournament, which is showing that we did a huge job for the popularization of basketball in Slovenia, which actually was one of our main goals, when we decided to candidate to organize this event.
There were many surprises which confirm that basketball keeps developing all over Europe. EuroBasket was therefore an event where you could see powerhouses like Russia or Turkey to conclude their appearance already in the first round of the competition or for instance Greece, where many players are members of back-to-back Euroleague champions Olympiacos, not making their way into the quarter finals. On the other hand, Ukraine made a pleasant surprise claiming the sixth place and proving that they can be an important player at the following EuroBasket 2015 at home.
