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Welcome here the live coverage of Beijing Olympic games 2008 at the last day. The Olympics basketball men final held today. Your desired link here.

Title: Olympics Live: USA vs. Spain

Date: Sunday August 24, 2008
Time: 8:15AM CEST

From Yahoo sports news-
LeBron James finished his free throw contest with Chris Paul, then hustled over to the media surrounding Kobe Bryant.

Two more questions for Mr. Bryant, James told reporters.

It was time to practice. For the last time.

More than three years after coming together in Las Vegas as the inaugural U.S. national team program, James and teammates worked out for the final time Saturday. Looming beneath the anticipation of Sunday’s gold-medal game against Spain was a sense that something special was coming to an end.

“I said a couple of days ago, we all want to get the gold medal. We want to get to this game. We want to celebrate; we want all the good things that come with it,” Dwyane Wade said. “But at the end of the day, knowing that we have to split up, and a lot of guys are not going to play together for a while, if ever again, it’s kind of a little bittersweet.”

Some players—guesses among the team range anywhere from five to eight— could be back in 2012. Even so, it can’t be as good as the first time.

Wade, James and Carmelo Anthony, who came into the NBA together five years ago, have been teammates longer than they have been with many players on their NBA clubs. Mike Krzyzewski has coached them longer than he has some players at Duke these days.

“We have great friendships,” Krzyzewski said. “There’s no question that we’re all very close friends, and from a coaching perspective, I’ve learned a lot from coaching these guys and the guys I’m coaching” with.

The story is familiar by now. With the Americans desperate to halt a slide that had dropped them from their loft atop world basketball, Jerry Colangelo was appointed managing director of USA Basketball in 2005. Feeling the United States could no longer expect to win just by bringing a group of players together shortly before the start of a competition, he created the national team, compiling a roster that now includes more than 30 players and requiring them to make a three-year commitment.

James, Wade and Anthony all quickly signed on, convinced that this experience would be better than the misery they endured while playing as NBA rookies in the 2004 Olympics. It wasn’t always great—the bronze medals they won in the 2006 world championship were no better than the ones they left Athens with—but they were poised to end things on a memorable note Sunday.

“I’ve been with D-Wade and LeBron for four years. We went through ups and downs throughout our four years with Team USA and to win this gold medal would just make them moments that we went through that much better,” Anthony said. “We were almost forced to be with each other … coming in the same year into the draft in ‘03. Me and LeBron, we gained a friendship in high school and we just stuck it out.”

James, Anthony and Dwight Howard are the only ones who have played in all the competitions over the last three summers, but many more have been a part of the program even when they weren’t playing. Wade, Chris Paul and Chris Bosh all trekked to Las Vegas last summer to be around the team even though they were out with injuries, just as Bryant did in ‘06.

With the same core of players around every year, Krzyzewski said this team is more prepared than recent U.S. ones, with more time for game planning and strategy details that was previously wasted on getting the players familiar with each other.

And unlike the failed chemistry experiment in Athens, where the players were thrown together so late that they couldn’t go much beyond learning each other’s names, this team has become close now. And seeing the results this time will surely convince other players to make a similar commitment in the future.

Colangelo said he’d heard perhaps half the team would be back. Howard, Paul, Bosh and Carlos Boozer all said they would be in London four years from now if asked, Anthony said he’d strongly consider it, and his longtime running mates James and Wade won’t rule it out.

So the national team program has caught the Americans up in international basketball—and maybe even put them ahead of the game for next time.

“The whole three years have been great,” Wade said. “So I’m sure guys that were questioning if they would ever play again will probably play in ‘12. We’ve got probably eight guys on this team that will only be 26, 27 by then at the most, so the core of this team will be back for sure.”