Liz Cambage reportedly had multiple behavioral issues while on the Australian Opals team, including an outburst where she allegedly hurled racial slurs at another team.
Prior to the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, Cambage called Nigerian players “monkeys” during a five-minute rant in Las Vegas, which ended in her walking away from her teammates. The Sunday Telegraph acquired video that also allegedly shows Cambage elbowing a Nigerian player in the head while the two teams faced off in a closed-door practice game in Las Vegas.
Following that, per News.com.au, Cambage apparently slaps a second Nigeran player on the face and called the whole team “monkeys” and says, “go back to your third world country.” The practice match was canceled before the second quarter was over.
The outlet spoke with some Nigerian players on the condition of anonymity. They verified what Cambage said. “That’s what I recall, the term monkeys, yes. And go back to where you came from,” one Nigerian player confirmed. “She definitely did use monkeys or monkey.”
A second player told the outlet, “I was on the court. She definitely said go back to your third-world country. I didn’t hear it, but [teammates] confirmed she called us monkeys.”
It seems that prior to the practice game, Cambage told players from the Nigerian team that she would rather be playing with them because her Opals teammates were racist. Cambage is half Nigerian on her father’s side.
But it seems the Opals team had a myriad of problems with Cambage, with a teammate telling the outlet, “There had been so many behavioral issues that had gone on previously that we could write a book, but that [Vegas] incident happened to be the final straw which happened to be the worst one,” they said.
Cambage apologized to the Nigerian team the following day, though some didn’t see it as genuine.
“Although she’s Australian, we knew she was half Nigerian so before then it was like she was one of us,” a Nigerian player said. “That was another thing to cut deep, for her to do that and not show any remorse at all.”
The report came out following an ABC Sports interview Cambage did, where she discussed playing with the Los Angeles Sparks in the WNBA, saying she now feels “protected on a level that the Opals, or the Australian team, never gave to me,” and that she felt like the Opals never wanted her “to be the best I can be.”
