The Other Dream Team

During the basketball championship of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, the Soviet Union pulled off a massive upset, defeating the United States in the game they had dominated for decades. This was not about to happen again: four years later, the Americans sent the Dream Team to Barcelona, composed of flashy stars from the NBA. The Soviet Union was no more, but under the flag of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a team made up of players from Russia and other former Soviet satellites participated in the games. The majority of the players from four years earlier had come from Lithuania, which seceded from Russia in 1990. In the semifinals, the Lithuanians didn't stand a chance against the American Dream Team, which won gold and stood as a symbol of glamour and excess. But then Lithuania, with some colorful support from the American band the Grateful Dead, defeated archrival CIS in the fight for the bronze metal. tells the story of the proud Lithuanians, who used their national sport to give their former repressor a taste of its own medicine, rediscovering their cultural identity in the process. It all goes back to 1940, when Stalin occupied the Baltic States and deported portions of the population to Siberia. The Lithuanians were playing basketball there as well.