The Olympic flame might have been well-and-truly handed over to the Brits in the Red Double Decker more than a week ago, but deep inside me, the spirit is still flaming high!

I used to play basketball at school and college, and in fact even captained my institute team during my time.

Much has changed in the game, and in the past decade, many NBA rules have been bled into mainstream Olympic basketball.

We recently created a collection of clipart on the Olympic Theme, and looking for inspiration and ideas in the Olympic Museum, i was piqued to see the “evolution” of basketball through the ages.

“Dunking”, and “Slam dunking” in particular, was the nearly unreachable mecca for most basketballers, and we used to envy the amazing ease with which NBA players used to slam dunk the ball almost at will.

And, see the image below, a collage of pictograms that were used in each Olympic game, to represent basketball.

Tokyo, Moscow and Los Angeles had a timid almost lame lone figure dribbling a ball.

Seoul got the dunk concept right, but the pose wrong. Only Yao Ming the Chinese giant could dunk the ball probably, standing like that!

Barcelona and Sydney look like they got some dancers on court, and not basketballers.

The Athens figure seems to want to climb on the ring, not put the ball in.

Beijing nails it perfectly. The backlifted hand, the ball, the other hand leaning in balance, the feet in the air, all in perfect choroeography, great stuff.

But, my favourite basketballer? Well, gotta be Jambav of course, right in the center of our collage! Find Jambav doing this, and many other poses too (in fact 35 of them!), in our stick figures collection.

Rajendran.

ToonDude from www.jambav.com