Viral Photo Doesn't Show Indian Basketball Players Next to Team USA

Fact-Check | We found that the photo showed the USA girls U16 basketball team with the team from El Salvador.

(Photo: The Quint)

A photograph pointing at the height difference between two basketball teams is being shared with a claim that it shows physical inequality between Indian and the USA under-16 basketball players.

However, we found that the photo, which dates back to 2019, showed the USA girls under-16 basketball team with the team from El Salvador. The photograph was taken during the FIBA League of the Americas U16 for women that took place in Chile in 2019.

CLAIM

The viral photo was shared with a caption that read, "USA under 16 years old vs India under 16 years old." The team in the red jersey had 'USA' written on them, however, the name of the country on the blue jersey was blurred out.

An archive of the post can be found here.

The same claim was shared by many users on Facebook and Twitter, archives of which can be found here, here, and here.

WHAT WE FOUND

We conducted a reverse image search of the viral photo and while going through the search results, we came across news reports from 2019 that had the same photo. A news report in Spanish that carried the same photo said that the two teams were team USA and team El Salvador. El Salvador, officially known as the Republic of El Salvador, is a country in Central America.

According to another report, the two teams were playing for the FIBA Americas U16 Championship 2019 in Chile. The American team won the game with an almost 100 points' margin.

A link to the article can be found here.

We came across another video in the search results where we could see the name "El Salvador" on the blue jersey.

"El Salvador" written on the blue jersey

We also found the photo and results of the game posted by the official Twitter handle of a sports news channel (@US_diarioas).

The video of the entire match is also available to watch on FIBA's YouTube channel.

Evidently, an image showing a comparison of under-16 basketball teams from the USA and El Salvador was shared with a false claim that it showed Indian players standing next to the America team.

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