MIES (Switzerland) – FIBA announced today that Argentina and Canada will host the two FIBA Women's Olympic Pre-Qualifying Tournaments 2019 for the Americas region.

The newly developed Olympic pre-qualification tournaments will tip-off in November 2019 to qualify teams to the FIBA Women's Olympic Qualifying Tournaments 2020, and ultimately the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Africa will host one tournament, with the Americas and Asia-Oceania hosting two tournaments each. Hosts for Africa and Asia-Oceania will be announced next week.

Argentina and Canada will be the hosts of the FIBA Women's Olympic Pre-Qualifying Tournaments 2019 for the Americas. The teams competing in the two pre-qualifying tournaments will be Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the USA.

22 National Teams will take part in the upcoming FIBA Women's Pre-Qualifying Tournaments to qualify for one of the four global FIBA Women's Olympic Qualifying Tournaments 2020, taking place on February 2020.

For both the Americas and Asia-Oceania regions, eight teams will compete for four spots, per region, at the FIBA Women's Olympic Qualifying Tournaments 2020 in February next year. For Africa, six teams will fight it out for two qualifying spots.

Meanwhile, in Europe the top six teams from the FIBA Women's EuroBasket 2019 will qualify directly to the FIBA Women's Olympic Qualifying Tournaments 2020.

Then these 16 top teams will go through to the FIBA Women's Olympic Qualifying Tournaments 2020, taking place in February 2020, which will be split into four groups in a draw held later in the year. The top three teams from each tournament will qualify for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games Women's Basketball Tournament. Both the USA, current gold medallists, and Japan, who are the hosts, will play in the qualification tournaments and regardless of their results advance through to Tokyo 2020.

This is the start of an exciting new women's competition system for FIBA, with more than 100 teams taking part in the new system, which will also include a new qualification system for the FIBA Women's Basketball World Cup 2022 and also the FIBA Women's EuroBasket 2021.

For more information about the Women's National Team Competition System, click here.

FIBA