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In Lithuania basketball is immensely popular. As such, many events were organized to mark the championship, including:
In the summer of 2011 a drible marathon around whole Lithuania was organized. Groups of people would drible from one town to the next one, where they would give the balls to another set of people who would then drible to the next town and so on. Every town of Lithuania was visited with TV documenting the events every day. Among the people who took part in the event were the president of Lithuania, several ministers, mayors, sportsmen, opera and ballet stars and so on. In the end the 13 balls were given to the Lithuanian National Basketball team on August 29th of 2011.
On August 29, 2011, Lithuania set a new record for simultaneous dribbling, previously held by Poland. 60,000 Lithuanians from Vilnius, Kaunas, Panevėžys, Klaipėda, Šiauliai and Alytus dribbled Molten balls simultaneously, beating Poland's record of 30,000 people.
Vilnius TV Tower observation deck was turned into a large basketball basket. It is made of lights that shine in the dark. The "basket" is 160 meters tall, higher than any other building in Lithuania.
Additionally, starting with the Spring of 2011, many of the TV and newspaper advertisements became basketball-oriented. Each of the cities where Eurobasket 2011 would take place received many minor details marking the championship: for example, the trash bins in Panevėžys became coloured like basketball balls, an abandoned building in Vilnius had its windows covered by flags of the participant nations while balls were dran on streets in some places.
Logo
Public contest was introduced to create the logo for the competition. 49 designs were presented initially to the organizers and the best 3 were sent to FIBA Europe, which selected the winning design. The author of it is Kęstutis Koira. The EuroBasket 2011 logo was unveiled on the 24th of January, 2009 in Cido Arena, Panevėžys, during the final game of Lithuanian Basketball Federation Cup. It displays the Columns of Gediminas overlaid on a backboard.
Song
Lithuania is the first host country of EuroBasket to have an official EuroBasket song. A song Celebrate basketball by Mia, Marijonas Mikutavičius and Mantas Jankavičius was chosen by a televoting in Lithuania. There are two versions of the song - Lithuanian and English. Later, another version was added - "Nebetyli sirgaliai" (lit. The Fans are Quiet no Longer).
All tickets were sold for macthes where Lithuania plays in a matter of several hours. Other tickets were also sold in advance for all venues except for Alytus. However the FIBA policy of selling tickets for 3 games at once meant that in some cases the sold-out arenas were not full as some fans would choose to go only to a part of the games their ticket entitled them to. This FIBA policy was altered in Panevėžys where there were separate tickets for the games Lithuania played.
It was first decided that 16 teams will participate in Eurobasket 2011, however FIBA Europe decided on September 5, 2010, in a meeting in Istanbul, that there would be 24 teams in the tournament, after the Qualifying Round was concluded.
Lithuania automatically received a place as the hosts, nine other countries that competed in the 2010 FIBA world championship also received a place, 12 Countries were determined through qualifying matches played on August 2010 (five have initially qualified, and seven were added after the decision to expand the tournament to 24 teams), and two more qualifiers have been decided in an additional qualifying tournament that took place in August 2011. All but one of the 15 countries that participated in the Qualifying Round have qualified for the final tournament.
Teams play each other once. The top three placed teams move on to the next round. In case of tie on points, direct matches between (points and goal average, i.e. points for/points against) are taken into acount, if still tied goal average in all matches will be used as tiebreaker and not point difference.