100 Olympic Tidbits: The Brazilian Scoring Machine
Some call him one of the best basketball players never to play in the NBA. Brazilian scoring machine Oscar Schmidt, a six-foot-eight forward, made his mark internationally by playing in five Olympic Games and leading all players in scoring in three of them. By the time he had finished his fifth tour of duty for his beloved Brazil, he was the all-time leading scorer in Olympic basketball history, amassing 1,094 points in 38 games for an average of 28.8 points.
He debuted as a 22-year-old in the 1980 Moscow Games with an average of 24.4 points per game, an output he matched four years later in Los Angeles. In the ’88 Games in Seoul, Schmidt was virtually unstoppable, averaging an astounding 41.9 points per contest, including an Olympic single-game record of 55 against Spain. In 1996, he answered the call of the national team one last time, and even though he was already 38 years old, Schmidt still averaged an impressive 27.4 points per game. Although none of his teams went past the quarterfinal stage, Schmidt will go down in history as one of the greatest basketball Olympians of all time.
Editor's Note: To celebrate the 100-day countdown to the London Games, we will be publishing 100 tidbits about the Olympics. Come back to Yahoo! PH Sports, as we publish a new tidbit every day.
