Embiid plans to 'go back at' French fans during men's hoops final

Joel Embiid has heard plenty of boos from French fans throughout the Paris Olympics and is bracing for more of the same during Saturday's gold-medal game.

The U.S. men's national team center said Friday that he plans to fire back at the boo birds in what he expects to be a "fun" matchup between Team USA and France.

"Frankly, I don't understand why I've gotten a lot of criticism from the crowd," Embiid said, according to ESPN's Brian Windhorst. "They're going to boo me. I'm going to go back at them and tell them to 'suck it.' And so it's going to be fun."

Embiid holds French and Cameroonian citizenship but chose to play for the U.S. because it's the country he lives in and where his son was born. He became an American citizen in 2022.

"Having lived half of my life in the U.S. and the other half in my country, Cameroon, it just looked like it was, you could go two ways," Embiid said. "I said from the beginning, and everybody knew that if Cameroon would've qualified, that would've never been a choice. And then having the family (in America) and having built a lot of things and having accomplished a lot of things in the U.S. and then knowing the group of guys deeply, it just made it easy."

Saturday's game will be a rematch of the final at the 2020 Tokyo Games, where Team USA defeated France 87-82 to take home the gold.