my serb mate at work about basketball, tennis, handball, volleyball, etc is not funny.
Agreed on basketball, Poland sucks, because they made the national league with teams composed only of foreigners plus some Polish bench warmers. After the first years of showing NBA matches live in Polish TV (about 15 years ago) there was a huge boom for basket here, you could see kids playing almost everywhere. It's all gone wasted, because the clubs weren't smart enough to profit from such a big interest among the kids.
Tennis wasn't ever a discipline for "proletaryat" in Poland, it was completely neglected for decades, and it's still quite an expensive sport, so we have only 2 women and 0 men in World top 100, but we'll see in the next years.
Handball? Who is the current World Champs runner-up?* I'm sure not Serbia, I don't know if they even played. Who's playing at the Olympic Games (men) - Poland or Serbia?*
Volleyball, well yeah, both teams were Olympic champions (Poland in 1976, Yugoslavia in 2000), but who played in the final of last World Championship, beating Serbia in the group stage 3-0?*
* correct answer: Poland
strongest man is on drugs.
And how many medals (Olympic or World championship) did the USA lose because of doping?
Do I have to make a list of all those athlets? It would be quite loooong.
Dating back to the 80's when Poland was busy leading the fight against Communism, other Eastern European nations were simply sitting back and waiting.
No, they weren't waiting, the DDR (Eastern Germany), Bulgaria and USSR were working hard on their steroids programs.