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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 that they had completed: a seventh straight Olympic Gold medal and the kind of uncommon dynastic run that makes them one of the crucial 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 may be made that the U.S. Girls’s Nationwide Crew is essentially 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. profitable streak to a outstanding 55 video games. There have been no hiccups or off nights. The group has operated as a thresher, ripping by 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 very best of the very best.”
That makes Sue Chook and Diana Taurasi the very best of the very best of the very best. They captured their fifth Gold medals in Tokyo and supplied the type of veteran management that has been a trademark of the ladies’s group throughout the streak. Sylvia Fowles earned her fourth Gold with the victory. Out of the three, solely Taurasi is enjoying on this 12 months’s Video games.
“There’s an final honor and pleasure with carrying this jersey,” stated Taurasi. “I hope the subsequent era feels that very same pleasure, that very same respect, that very same accountability to ensure to return out right here and play the suitable method. There’s nothing prefer it. There’s nothing like enjoying within the Olympics…Whenever you put that USA in your chest, you’re enjoying for everybody who loves basketball in our nation, and that accountability that weighs heavy on us. That’s in all probability one factor we gained’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 because the Nineteen Fifties. The ladies’s sport has been an essential—and extremely profitable—a part of USA Basketball, and the continued success and domination of U.S. groups reveals how sturdy the game is on this nation.
U.S. girls have gained 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 because of 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 sport. “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) school sport 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 made from 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 last. Washington was once more excellent 4 years later, when the U.S. went to Rio and blitzed to a 6-0 file and a second-straight title. A 51-48 victory over the Soviet Union within the last sport clinched the Gold.
That may be the U.S. group’s final victory over the us for a very long time. The Soviets gained the subsequent 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 sport.
However that was it for any degree of American disappointment. Massive issues had been forward, and the U.S. girls had 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 residence 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 robust backbone that has pushed the U.S. groups in worldwide play.
The Soviets boycotted the ’84 Los Angeles Video games, however the gifted U.S. group that gained 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 might have defeated their important rivals, the ’88 Seoul Olympics answered any questions.
The U.S. gained 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 Crew stomped its approach to Gold, the ladies might solely handle a Bronze, due to a semifinal loss to the Unified Crew, as the previous Soviet Union was then recognized. That may be the final time the ladies’s group would stand on one thing apart from the highest degree of the podium. Starting in Atlanta, the U.S. grew to become 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 sport 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 subsequent six Olympiads, neither did anybody else.
TOTAL DOMINANCE
The numbers on the 2000 Olympics had been extraordinarily spectacular. First off, the U.S. was 8-0 within the event 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 median 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 robust offensive choice. One of many greatest tales was Teresa Edwards’ choice to step away from worldwide play after setting the file for many factors scored in all competitions by a U.S. participant and enjoying 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 US discovered itself matched up with Australia within the Gold medal sport. Nonetheless, due to 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 could 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 task 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 median 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 US 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 last sport. In what was turning into a ritual, the U.S. skunked its rivals by greater than 30 factors a sport (34.4) and solely had one group come inside 25 factors. Chook and Taurasi teamed with Tamika Catchings as captains, and all three had been key contributors. Taurasi led the group with 12.4 ppg, Chook handed out 4.5 apg and Catchings was stout on the boards and the defensive finish. The world could not have favored it, however the U.S. was rolling, and there was nothing anybody might 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-Chook triumvirate once more supplied the required management, however the group was full of so many stars that it was tough to think about a necessity for somebody to be out entrance. Any of the group members might have—and did—fill that position.
The triumph demonstrated the rising breadth of USA Basketball’s developmental skills. It’s probably {that a} group of 12 different American gamers might have gained Gold, had the squad that tore by Rio stayed residence. A sport that didn’t acquire 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 sport has been fairly mature and widespread internationally for many years.
Because the Paris Video games daybreak, it’s clear USA Basketball has perfected the formulation for achievement within the girls’s realm. The sport is ripening yearly on the prep, school and WNBA ranges, offering an countless stream of expertise for the nationwide group. There’s no assure of Gold within the coming Olympiad—or some other—however it’s laborious 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 season.
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Photographs through Getty Photos.