The 31-year-old West Flemish was a guest on ‘De Tafel van Gert’ this week. Vanloo’s season in Turkey recently ended in the semi-finals of the play-offs, with Galatasaray losing to Meesseman’s Fenerbahçe. ‘JVL’ averaged 13 points and almost 9 assists in 31 appearances. Her exploits as a playmaker with a deadly shot earned her an invitation to the training camp of the Washington Mystics, the WNBA team that drafted Claessens and became champion with Emma Meesseman and Kim Mestdagh.
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Fries
Vanloo’s career peaked at the age of 31. She became European champion with the Belgian Cats last year, which she considers to be the best moment of her career so far.
“We actually celebrated that all summer long,” she says. “I saw many of the girls again and enjoyed it all that time. That I was craving a pack of fries then? Yeaaaaaa. I always just grab a frikadel with it, simple. A frikadel and fries, that’s me. We then sit there for fourteen days with dry rice and dry pasta, lettuce… There’s no taste in that. There is no chef there especially for us or anything.”
The flamboyant West Flemish player subsequently moved from Montpellier, France to Galatasaray. “It is a top club, that club is also so big in football. And the fans are fierce, especially when we play derbies. They are also very angry when you lose a match and you sometimes get hate messages, especially in the beginning when I hadn’t really proven myself yet. You sometimes get “You’re a piece of sh*t”. But if you prove yourself and they see that you love the club, that will change completely. If you play a bad match, they will tell you that they are behind you. That is part of top sport.”
What also comes with it: not being home much. For example, Vanloo had to leave her dog Tobi with her mother. Taking her ‘best friend’ to Turkey was not an option. Fortunately, for those lonely moments, there is always… Samson & Gert.
“You make my homesickness disappear,” she says to host Gert Verhulst. “I still watch Samson & Gert. My favorite episode? I do have a few, but the one with the swimming pool in the town hall. But there are many people who underestimate this. I had to grow up very quickly to be able to do everything for my sport. As a result, I quickly had to put being a child aside. That takes me back to that time and… I just think it’s good humor, I can’t help it (laughs).”
America
At the beginning of this year, the Cats played the Olympic qualifying tournament in a full Sports Palace and beat world power America, but an incorrect call by the refs threw a spanner in the works.
“I wanted that week to last forever,” said Vanloo. “That match against America? I still remember that moment very well. We actually played the match of our lives, also because of the audience. I remember Emma saying to me in the third quarter: come on, let’s go for it. Because we were actually going to save ourselves something for the two more important matches afterwards. And then yes, that foot on the line (from Kelsey Plum, ed.)… I also saw it happen and made a sign like: Hello, don’t you see it? But VAR doesn’t exist so we really lost at the buzzer… It’s still frustrating because we could have ended up in the history books.”
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This week Vanloo leaves for the US, where she can train with the Washington Mystics. The aim is to earn a spot on the team that opens the WNBA season on May 15.
“It is a dream come true,” said the West Flemish woman. “I could get very emotional about this. I have worked for this for a long time and the fact that I can do this at the age of 31 is something I am very proud of. I have come a very long way in all areas to be where I am now, so it is really a countdown to Thursday. That I will walk over corpses? In the past I have been a bit too good and allowed myself to do too much, a bit too lazy. I’ve realized that in this sport… I have an English quote stuck in my head: ‘You’ve got to be so good they can’t ignore you’. I live with that mentality every day. So I’m not going there to go shopping, but to win.”
Vanloo – just like Kim and Hanne Mestdagh – could have already played in the US. She could join the Iowa university team for four years, where phenomenon Caitlyn Clark made waves this season, but Vanloo did not pass a mandatory exam.
“That’s the bummer of my life,” she laughs. “It was an SAT test, an English test to see whether you could also cope with the school level. Of course, it also takes four years of further study. They were 100 percent sure about basketball, but I had to take that test. I arrive in Brussels at 8:00 am and I see everyone walking around with books. I was like, ‘Huh, did I have to study for that?’. I thought it would work, but I sat down and wow, those were those English geometric terms and stuff. I then saw Retin Obasohan, Belgian Lion, diagonally in front of me, and he filled it in very easily. So I: okay, second bubble, fourth bubble… Suddenly, on page nine or ten, I see a cartoon with a giraffe on him. I turn mine around: a cartoon with an elephant. We simply had two completely different exams. So it was fantastic. My grades from school could have saved me, but I was mainly focused on basketball. It was just about getting through it and training. So they didn’t let me in.”
© BELGIUM