Rodrigo Palacio hangs up his shoes and switches to basketball
Argentinian Rodrigo Palacerunner-up in the world in 2014 with the Argentine football team and until last season, a player for the Italian team Brescia – Serie B – made a surprise on Tuesday by announcing that Moved to basketball by Garignano 1976Italian fourth division team.
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castlewho shares his hometown (Bahia Blanca) with Manu Ginobili – the Argentine basketball legend – and without a team since the end of last season, announced last Monday his retirement from the football world at the age of 40 with a message on his account from Twitter: “Thank you very much for everything, football”.
However, the surprise came on Tuesday when Post a video In the same social network He appeared in it playing a friendly match in the Gargnano shirt 1976of the Italian Basketball League.
“Let someone tell you until what age you can play basketball,” was the phrase that accompanied the video of the former footballer, who is 1.76 meters tall.
At the age of 40, after a season in Brescia in which he played 33 matches, scored six goals and provided four assists, Palacio began his second sports career, this time in a sport where he would use his hands.
Cue did not enjoy the first appearance of the dream. His first match in Garignano’s shirt ended in defeat (73-65) in a match in which he could only score four points.
Before retiring from football, Palacio also wore the shirts of the Argentine teams Bella Vista, Huracán, Banfield and Boca Juniors before traveling to Italy to dedicate himself as one of the biggest Argentine names at the moment in the Italian League, where he played with Genoa, Inter Milan, Bologna and Brescia.
His journey with the first team, the Whites, with whom he played two World Cups, Germany 2006 and Brazil 2014, will inevitably be marked by his mistake that faced the door in the final against Germany in 2014, which could have been the decisive goal to lift the long-awaited World Cup – which He eventually won the German national team – in a game that ended with the ball flying high.
Thus Palacio, at the age of forty and after a two-decade career, began a new sporting stage in Italian basketball, in the modest Milan club Garignano 1976.