Wins over the Netherlands’ women’s wheelchair basketball team are so rare that its Paralympic opponents have been settling for moral victories.k9win

Spain, an upstart among the European powerhouses, held the team, known as the Dutch Angels, to a 3-point lead at halftime in Wednesday’s quarterfinal, but never recovered from a third-quarter blasting in a 61-43 loss. “We competed for 32 minutes and we were close,” said Franck Belen, Spain’s coach. “It was something special for us because they are the big team and we were the little team.”

“They’re bigger than us, faster than us, but we can hang with them for sure,” Ixhelt González of the United States said after her team lost, 69-56, in pool play on Saturday.

Germany, one of the most physical teams in the competition, mauled the leading Dutch scorer, Mariska Beijer, during a bludgeoning battle and took solace in its losing effort. “We fought,” said Mareike Miller, a German who won gold at the 2012 London Games. “I think we did OK, and now we want to move forward and beat some of the other teams.”

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The Dutch, who face Canada in a Paralympic semifinal on Friday, arrived in Paris as something of a para sports dynasty, having won seven consecutive international tournaments since 2017. Their streak stretches across four European titles and two world championships, with Paralympic gold at the Tokyo Games in 2021 in the mix.

Through the team’s first four Paralympics games this year, the Netherlands averaged a 24-point margin of victory, but that figure was skewed by a 53-point win over Japan in which a Japanese guard was toppled out of her chair by a hard screen and carted off on a stretcher.

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