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They posed for pictures, hamming it up whereas displaying their medals. They beamed with pleasure because the Nationwide Anthem was performed. And a few of them even cried.
Then, they mirrored on what they’d completed: a seventh straight Olympic Gold medal and the kind of uncommon dynastic run that makes them probably the most legendary groups in basketball historical past. The one outfit with extra consecutive championships is the Boston Celtics, which captured eight consecutive NBA crowns from 1959-66. However since Invoice Russell and his compadres weren’t taking over the entire world, an argument will be made that the U.S. Girls’s Nationwide Workforce is probably the most dominant hoops squad ever.
The 2021 win over Japan within the Tokyo Olympic Video games captured the Gold and prolonged the U.S. successful streak to a outstanding 55 video games. There have been no hiccups or off nights. The group has operated as a thresher, ripping via each opponent and sustaining a uncommon focus that has produced legendary outcomes.
“Our sustained success happens due to the sacrifice of our gamers,” stated 2021 head coach Daybreak Staley, who performed on three of the seven victorious groups. “We at all times have the perfect of the perfect.”
That makes Sue Chicken and Diana Taurasi the perfect of the perfect of the perfect. They captured their fifth Gold medals in Tokyo and supplied the form of veteran management that has been an indicator of the ladies’s group in the course of the streak. Sylvia Fowles earned her fourth Gold with the victory. Out of the three, solely Taurasi is taking part in on this yr’s Video games.
“There’s an final honor and pleasure with carrying this jersey,” stated Taurasi. “I hope the following era feels that very same pleasure, that very same respect, that very same accountability to verify to come back out right here and play the appropriate means. There’s nothing prefer it. There’s nothing like taking part in within the Olympics…While you put that USA in your chest, you’re taking part in for everybody who loves basketball in our nation, and that accountability that weighs heavy on us. That’s in all probability one factor we received’t miss.”
Though girls’s basketball didn’t change into an Olympic sport till 1976, the connection between USA Basketball and the nation’s high feminine gamers dates again a lot additional. U.S. groups have competed in World Championship/Cup and Pan American Video games competitions for the reason that Nineteen Fifties. The ladies’s recreation has been an vital—and extremely profitable—a part of USA Basketball, and the continued success and domination of U.S. groups reveals how strong the game is on this nation.
U.S. girls have received 9 Olympic Gold medals and 11 World Cup titles. They’ve featured the nation’s finest gamers and a few of its most legendary coaches. Throughout its 50 years of existence, USA Basketball has strived to be the usual for the game worldwide, and due to the success of its girls’s groups, that aim has change into a actuality.
“This simply doesn’t occur in a single day,” Taurasi stated after the Tokyo Gold medal recreation. “This can be a course of that occurs over time.”
EARLY DAYS
For many individuals, their first glimpse of girls’s basketball was within the Affiliation for Intercollegiate Athletics for Girls (AIAW) faculty recreation or the primary time the Worldwide Olympic Committee allowed girls’s basketball to be contested. However U.S. girls’s basketball goes again effectively earlier than that. In 1926, the AAU started holding nationwide championship tournaments, and 27 years later, in Santiago, Chile, the U.S. captured its first-ever world title.
Led by Katherine Washington, the 1953 group was product of seven members of the Nashville Enterprise Faculty group, one future member and one other participant, and it dumped the host Chile group, 49-36, within the ultimate. Washington was once more excellent 4 years later, when the U.S. went to Rio and blitzed to a 6-0 report and a second-straight title. A 51-48 victory over the Soviet Union within the ultimate recreation clinched the Gold.
That will be the U.S. group’s final victory over the us for a very long time. The Soviets received the following 4 World Championship tournaments and went an ideal 23-0 within the course of. When the groups met within the first Olympic girls’s competitors, the 1976 Video games in Montreal, the us ripped the U.S. group, 112-77, within the group stage. Quite a lot of circumstances stored the groups aside after that. The united states didn’t take part within the 1979 World Championships, held in Seoul, as a result of the nation didn’t have diplomatic relations with South Korea.
The US boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which meant the groups’ assembly within the ’83 World Championships in Sao Paulo, Brazil, was their first in seven years. The consequence was a crushing, 84-82 American loss within the Gold medal recreation.
However that was it for any stage of American disappointment. Massive issues have been forward, and the U.S. girls have been about to indicate the world how the game was performed.
STEPPING FORWARD
When the U.S. group arrived in Montreal in ’76 for the first-ever Olympics to incorporate a girls’s competitors, they discovered a two-bedroom house ready for them. That meant 12 gamers must cram into bunk beds and keep away from tripping over one another. These modest beginnings helped create the sturdy backbone that has pushed the U.S. groups in worldwide play.
The Soviets boycotted the ’84 Los Angeles Video games, however the proficient U.S. group that received Gold featured standouts like Cheryl Miller and Lynette Woodard and was coached by the legendary Pat Summitt. Whereas the us’s absence led many to debate whether or not the Individuals may have defeated their predominant rivals, the ’88 Seoul Olympics answered any questions.
The U.S. received Gold and whipped the Soviets, 102-88, within the semifinals. The trio of Katrina McClain, Teresa Edwards and Cynthia Cooper led the group and made the Individuals virtually invincible. That wasn’t the case 4 years later, in Barcelona. Whereas the lads’s Dream Workforce stomped its technique to Gold, the ladies may solely handle a Bronze, because of a semifinal loss to the Unified Workforce, as the previous Soviet Union was then recognized. That will be the final time the ladies’s group would stand on one thing aside from the highest stage of the podium. Starting in Atlanta, the U.S. turned unstoppable.
The ’96 girls’s group was an ideal 8-0, and no group got here inside 15 factors of it. Led by coach Tara VanDerveer, the U.S. featured a deep, versatile group with Lisa Leslie, who averaged 19.5 ppg, McClain, Sheryl Swoopes and Ruthie Brown. The group’s 111-87 rout of Brazil within the Gold medal recreation featured 71.9 % field-goal taking pictures within the first half. Merely put, the Brazilians didn’t have an opportunity.
As the remainder of the world came upon over the following six Olympiads, neither did anybody else.
TOTAL DOMINANCE
The numbers on the 2000 Olympics have been extraordinarily spectacular. First off, the U.S. was 8-0 within the match and outscored its opposition by 21.7 ppg. Sure, the group was an offensive juggernaut, defeating groups like New Zealand by 50-plus factors and taking pictures a mean 50.8 % from the sector, however it additionally stifled its rivals, holding them to 37.7 % success. Leslie and Swoopes once more led the best way, with Yolanda Griffith offering one other sturdy offensive choice. One of many largest tales was Teresa Edwards’ choice to step away from worldwide play after setting the report for many factors scored in all competitions by a U.S. participant and taking part in in 5 totally different Olympiads.
When the U.S. group went to Greece for the ’04 Video games, issues weren’t fairly as simple, however that didn’t imply the Individuals didn’t prevail. Their first six contests didn’t produce an excessive amount of stress, though a 71-58 win over Spain had some moments of concern. Defeating Russia, 66-62, within the semifinals wasn’t simple, and the USA discovered itself matched up with Australia within the Gold medal recreation. Nonetheless, because of the group’s depth and expertise, the U.S. prevailed, 74-63, for its third-straight Olympic Gold.
The story of the group was Leslie, who led everybody in scoring (15.6 ppg) and rebounding (8.0 rpg). It will be the standout’s third Olympic Video games, and when the competitors was over, she was the all-time U.S. chief in factors, rebounds and blocked photographs in Olympic play.
Though Leslie didn’t play as massive a job in 2008 in Beijing, she was nonetheless formidable (10.1 ppg, 7.0 rpg). However Sylvia Fowles, Tina Thompson and Diana Taurasi took the lead because the Individuals put collectively their most dominating efficiency thus far, whipping their eight opponents by a mean of 37.6 ppg for the fourth Gold of their seven-Olympiad streak. Even the ultimate towards Australia (once more) wasn’t aggressive, with the USA romping, 92-65.
Leslie joined Edwards as the one athlete, male or feminine, to win 4 Olympic basketball Golds.
Gold medal quantity 5 within the string was captured in London, with France offering the opposition within the ultimate recreation. In what was turning into a ritual, the U.S. skunked its rivals by greater than 30 factors a recreation (34.4) and solely had one group come inside 25 factors. Chicken and Taurasi teamed with Tamika Catchings as captains, and all three have been key contributors. Taurasi led the group with 12.4 ppg, Chicken handed out 4.5 apg and Catchings was stout on the boards and the defensive finish. The world could not have appreciated it, however the U.S. was rolling, and there was nothing anybody may do about it.
That was definitely the case in Rio, when the U.S. topped the century mark in six of its eight wins. The ultimate was a 101-72 rout of Spain, and the group’s common margin of victory was 37.2 ppg. The Taurasi-Catchings-Chicken triumvirate once more supplied the required management, however the group was stuffed with so many stars that it was troublesome to think about a necessity for somebody to be out entrance. Any of the group members may have—and did—fill that position.
The triumph demonstrated the rising breadth of USA Basketball’s developmental talents. It’s probably {that a} group of 12 different American gamers may have received Gold, had the squad that tore via Rio stayed residence. A sport that didn’t achieve Olympic acceptance till 40 years after the lads’s model debuted had surpassed its male counterpart by way of dominance. That shocked some—though it shouldn’t have—the ladies’s skilled recreation has been fairly mature and widespread internationally for many years.
Because the Paris Video games daybreak, it’s clear USA Basketball has perfected the method for fulfillment within the girls’s realm. The sport is ripening yearly on the prep, faculty and WNBA ranges, offering an infinite stream of expertise for the nationwide group. There’s no assure of Gold within the coming Olympiad—or another—however it’s onerous to think about one other nation with the assets and dedication essential to usurp the U.S.
In different phrases, followers of the U.S. girls’s group ought to prepare for an additional celebration this summer time.
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Photographs by way of Getty Pictures.
