When Greece enters the stadium first in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris – which  should always be in Athens – NBA superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo will be the male flag bearer, and the first black man to do so in a country that didn’t want him.

But he almost could have done it for Spain – which wanted him because he could play basketball with the best on the planet – or for Nigeria, his parents’ home country, which they fled to come to Greece and found themselves not welcome.

Greece has long been unfriendly to refugees and migrants and when his family came from Nigeria and he was born in Greece, he still wasn’t a citizen under Greek law, leaving him stateless, essentially without a country.

It wasn’t until he showed he could play basketball with the best, and better than them, that there was a rush job to get him citizenship, said author Mirin Fader in her book, ‘Giannis: The Improbable Rise of an NBA MVP’.

She wrote that a year before the NBA draft in which he was picked as a raw teenager with unlimited potential, drive, humility, a pterodactyl wingspan – and a love for Greece, speaking the language fluently and more Greek than any Golden Dawn or Greek Solution faux patriot – he applied for a Nigerian passport.

“What was largely underreported was that the Greek government began to speed up the process only once they realized that not only did Giannis have NBA potential but that Giannis and his team had reportedly turned to the embassy of Nigeria, hoping to gain citizenship here,” she wrote. But he wanted Greek citizenship.

“The possibility of him playing for Nigeria’s national team – and not Greece’s national team – and playing for Zaragoza as a Nigerian player may have added more pressure,” she wrote.

Antetokounmpo peddled goods on the streets of his Sepolia neighborhood as a boy to get money for his family until he was discovered on the courts and his star began to rise.

“Still, it was the potential NBA career that largely motivated the government to finally fast-track Giannis’s citizenship, given that Giannis performing well in the NBA could benefit Greece,” wrote Fader in her best-selling book.

He and his brother Thanasis – now his teammate for the Milwaukee Bucks – were granted a special exemption and received their citizenship papers in May, 2013, little more than a month before the NBA draft where Giannis sat in the stands with a Greek flag, deserving it more than shipping oligarchs who wave foreign flags.

The family changed the name from Adetokunbo to Antetokounmpo, a more traditional Greek-sounding name, after giving the children Greek first names, which they wear as proudly as the Greek flag he was draped in at the draft.

From there, his career skyrocketed to make him an MVP, one of the best players in NBA history, and bring the Bucks their first championship since 1971, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar took them to the title.

For all that, he wasn’t able to bring Greece a European championship as did Nick Galis in the unforgettable 1987 tourney, toppling the Soviet Union and elevating basketball in the country and Galis in the pantheon of greats.

Nor was Greece able to reach the Olympics, the last time appearing in 2008, before this year’s qualifying tournament – in Athens – that saw Antetokounmpo lift his country – that’s HIS country – to victory and a spot in the Paris Games.

Giannis Antetokounmpo wept.

As his son patted his knee, Antetokounmpo was overcome with emotion in getting his country – that’s HIS country – into the Olympics, crying like a kid who just found out he made his Little League team. He cried again in the locker room.

That made sure he would be the flag bearer, along with race walker Antigoni Drisbioti, a two time European champion and bronze medalist in the 2023 World Championships, at 35 kilometers (21.8 miles), so this will be a stroll for her.

“It’s an incredible feeling,” he said after qualification. “Since I was a kid I always wanted to play in the Olympic Games,” he added, said the BBC. In a 2020 TNT documentary he said it hasn’t been easy being Greek.

“Greece is a country of white people, life can be difficult for someone with the color of my skin. Or of another nationality. You go to a lot of neighborhoods, and you face a lot of racism,” he said.

Spyros Kapralos, President of the Greek Olympic Committee, said there was“unanimity” in the decision for Antetokounmpo to carry the flag in Paris along the Seine AKA Sewer River, and said both flag bearers will “lift our country high.”

Antetokounmpo will be following in the very big footsteps of Sofoklis Schortsanitis, from Cameroon, vilified by nationalists as a black man on the Greek national team that beat the United States in the 2006 world championship.

Unless Antetokounmpo can pull off a basketball miracle, he won’t get the gold because Greece is in a grouping with Australia – which almost beat the US in an exhibition – and Canada, which has the most NBA players besides the Americans, as well as Spain, ranked second in the world behind the U.S.

If he does, the celebrations will outpace those of 2004 when Greece won the European soccer championship as a 150-1 underdog, and the whole country should cry tears of joy. Go Giannis.