This story seems in SLAM Presents USA Basketball. Store now.
They posed for images, hamming it up whereas displaying their medals. They beamed with delight 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 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. successful 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 one of the best of one of the best.”
That makes Sue Chicken and Diana Taurasi one of the best of one of the best of one of the best. They captured their fifth Gold medals in Tokyo and supplied the form of veteran management that has been a trademark of the ladies’s group through the streak. Sylvia Fowles earned her fourth Gold with the victory. Out of the three, solely Taurasi is enjoying on this yr’s Video games.
“There may be an final honor and delight with sporting this jersey,” stated Taurasi. “I hope the following era feels that very same delight, that very same respect, that very same accountability to verify to return out right here and play the precise means. There’s nothing prefer it. There’s nothing like enjoying within the Olympics…While 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 received’t miss.”
Though girls’s basketball didn’t turn out to be an Olympic sport till 1976, the connection between USA Basketball and the nation’s prime 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 vital—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 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 because of the success of its girls’s groups, that aim has turn out to be 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 through the years.”
EARLY DAYS
For many individuals, their first glimpse of ladies’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 properly 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 closing. 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 closing sport clinched the Gold.
That may be the U.S. group’s final victory over the united states 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 united states ripped the U.S. group, 112-77, within the group stage. A wide range of circumstances stored the groups aside after that. The us 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 USA 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 end result was a crushing, 84-82 American loss within the Gold medal sport.
However that was it for any stage of American disappointment. Massive issues had been forward, and the U.S. girls had been about to point out 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 condo 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 received Gold featured standouts like Cheryl Miller and Lynette Woodard and was coached by the legendary Pat Summitt. Whereas the united states’s absence led many to debate whether or not the People may have defeated their primary 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 People virtually invincible. That wasn’t the case 4 years later, in Barcelona. Whereas the lads’s Dream Workforce stomped its strategy to Gold, the ladies may solely handle a Bronze, due to a semifinal loss to the Unified Workforce, 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 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 sport featured 71.9 p.c field-goal taking pictures within the first half. Merely put, the Brazilians didn’t have an opportunity.
As the remainder of the world discovered over the following 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 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 p.c from the sector, but it surely additionally stifled its rivals, holding them to 37.7 p.c 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 report 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 straightforward, however that didn’t imply the People 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 straightforward, and the USA 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 might 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 huge 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 People put collectively their most dominating efficiency to this point, 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 closing 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. Chicken and Taurasi teamed with Tamika Catchings as captains, and all three had 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 might not have preferred it, however the U.S. was rolling, and there was nothing anybody may do about it.
That was actually 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 mandatory management, however the group was crammed with so many stars that it was tough to think about a necessity for somebody to be out entrance. Any of the group members may have—and did—fill that function.
The triumph demonstrated the rising breadth of USA Basketball’s developmental skills. It’s doubtless {that a} group of 12 different American gamers may have received 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 components for fulfillment within the girls’s realm. The sport is ripening yearly on the prep, school 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—but it surely’s onerous to think about one other nation with the sources and dedication essential to usurp the U.S.
In different phrases, followers of the U.S. girls’s group ought to prepare for one more celebration this summer time.
SLAM PRESENTS USA BASKETBALL IS AVAILABLE NOW
Photographs through Getty Pictures.
