An emotional Penny Taylor is confident she will be back on the basketball court in nine months after the knee injury which devastated her Olympic Games hopes.
Australian star Taylor suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament in a game for her Turkish club Fenerbahce five weeks ago.
After recent surgery in Melbourne, 30-year-old Taylor says she expects to miss the entire American WNBA season and much of the European season as well as the Games in July before she returns.
Her injury robs the Opals - and the London Games - of one of the world's best women's basketballers.
But Taylor is confident Australia still has the firepower to finally break through for the gold medal that has been narrowly elusive in the past three Olympics - and beat the United States.
"Missing the WNBA, missing the Olympics, missing over half the European season, as far as my career goes, it's pretty devastating," Taylor said.
"We have some great talent. It'll be a group effort to get things going. The USA team is always really strong, strong in every position.
"We're going to be competitive and really strong going into this, and we've got players who've played there (at an Olympics), more than probably at the last Olympics, and they're going to have a great preparation."
Taylor had been playing career-best basketball in Europe before her injury.
She will do her injury rehabilitation in the United States with her WNBA club Phoenix Mercury.
The Opals, silver medallists in the past three Olympics, go into the first stage of an intensive pre-Games training camp in Canberra next week.
AAP
Tags: basketball, olympics-summer, sport, australia First posted May 07, 2012 15:59:53
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