Dominique Malonga seeks to make history with the first dunk in a basketball World Cup

In 2002, American Lisa Leslie, wearing the Los Angeles Sparks jersey, became the first player to score a dunk in the WNBA. Ten years later, at the 2012 London Games, Australian Liz Cambage broke the ceiling in an Olympic event. But until this tournament, no woman has managed to rise to 3.05m and smash the rim in a World Cup match. The terrain remains virgin but the barrier seems increasingly close to being torn down due to the continuous physical improvement of the best basketball players in the world.

The spotlight today is on the French center Dominique Malonga, a 20-year-old center, 1.97m tall and 2.16m wide, teammate of the Spanish Awa Fam in the Seattle Storm of the American league. "If I have the opportunity, I will try it. They are plays that arise in the moment. For me it is something natural that I carry within me," Malonga warned before this championship, who did not have the opportunity to open the encyclopedia in the first match of the tournament against Hungary or against Korea (two wins with a score and the qualification already for the quarterfinals), although he had achieved it in a qualifying duel for the World Cup with France against the Philippines and also in the All Star in the WNBA.

Being a great athlete is a basic ingredient to go down in history as much or more than centimeters. The Chinese wall Zhang Ziyu, 2.23m tall and considered the tallest professional player of all time, can barely get off the ground and therefore rise towards the hoop even though she touches the bottom of the backboard with her hand without having to jump.

“It is power and it is love,” Betty Cebrián, a 1.95m former center who was capped 252 times with Spain, tells this newspaper; "First, the circumstances must be met, the play during the match so that the mate can occur. In the warm-up rounds you do see some. And then, my feeling is that women do not have a special obsession with making a mate and for it to be something brutal. Russian players of my generation could do it quite well but they did not need that show in competitions. The physique has to come together with the character and personality to make that display of strength." She, she says, could hit the hoop with a handball, but not with a basketball, which in her time was still a one-size-fits-all, the male size, larger, since she has “a small hand.” “With the basketball one I needed both hands and I couldn't jump as much,” explains Cebrián, “and when they changed it to the smaller women's size, my ankles were already broken and I couldn't jump as much.”

The former player, who now works at FIBA ​​as head of Women and Basketball and Projects, remembers that Carlota Castrejana, an Olympian in basketball and then in athletics with the triple jump, also crushed in training thanks to her status as a jumper and her 1.88m. And he points to Awa Fam, 1.95m, as the Spanish woman capable of joining this select club of Lisa Leslie, Liz Cambage...