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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 one of the vital 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 up the entire world, an argument might be made that the U.S. Ladies’s Nationwide Group 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 workforce 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,” mentioned 2021 head coach Daybreak Staley, who performed on three of the seven victorious groups. “We all the time 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 an indicator of the ladies’s workforce in the course of 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’s an final honor and pleasure with sporting this jersey,” mentioned Taurasi. “I hope the subsequent technology feels that very same pleasure, that very same respect, that very same duty to verify to return out right here and play the precise method. There’s nothing prefer it. There’s nothing like enjoying within the Olympics…If you put that USA in your chest, you’re enjoying for everybody who loves basketball in our nation, and that duty 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 for the reason that 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 exhibits 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 greatest 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 turn out to be a actuality.
“This simply doesn’t occur in a single day,” Taurasi mentioned after the Tokyo Gold medal sport. “It is a course of that occurs through the years.”
EARLY DAYS
For many individuals, their first glimpse of girls’s basketball was within the Affiliation for Intercollegiate Athletics for Ladies (AIAW) faculty 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 workforce was manufactured from seven members of the Nashville Enterprise Faculty workforce, one future member and one other participant, and it dumped the host Chile workforce, 49-36, within the remaining. 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 remaining sport clinched the Gold.
That may be the U.S. workforce’s final victory over the united states for a very long time. The Soviets received 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 united states ripped the U.S. workforce, 112-77, within the group stage. Quite a lot of circumstances saved 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 stage of American disappointment. Huge 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. workforce 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 robust 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. workforce 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 Individuals might have defeated their fundamental 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 workforce and made the Individuals virtually invincible. That wasn’t the case 4 years later, in Barcelona. Whereas the lads’s Dream Group stomped its option to Gold, the ladies might solely handle a Bronze, due to a semifinal loss to the Unified Group, as the previous Soviet Union was then identified. That may be the final time the ladies’s workforce 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 workforce was an ideal 8-0, and no workforce got here inside 15 factors of it. Led by coach Tara VanDerveer, the U.S. featured a deep, versatile workforce with Lisa Leslie, who averaged 19.5 ppg, McClain, Sheryl Swoopes and Ruthie Brown. The workforce’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 have been extraordinarily spectacular. First off, the U.S. was 8-0 within the event and outscored its opposition by 21.7 ppg. Sure, the workforce was an offensive juggernaut, defeating groups like New Zealand by 50-plus factors and taking pictures a mean 50.8 % from the sphere, however it additionally stifled its rivals, holding them to 37.7 % success. Leslie and Swoopes once more led the way in which, with Yolanda Griffith offering one other robust offensive possibility. 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 completely different Olympiads.
When the U.S. workforce went to Greece for the ’04 Video games, issues weren’t fairly as straightforward, 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 straightforward, and the USA discovered itself matched up with Australia within the Gold medal sport. Nonetheless, due to the workforce’s depth and expertise, the U.S. prevailed, 74-63, for its third-straight Olympic Gold.
The story of the workforce 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 Individuals put collectively their most dominating efficiency so far, whipping their eight opponents by a mean of 37.6 ppg for the fourth Gold of their seven-Olympiad streak. Even the ultimate in opposition to 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 remaining 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 workforce come inside 25 factors. Chicken and Taurasi teamed with Tamika Catchings as captains, and all three have been key contributors. Taurasi led the workforce 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 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 workforce’s common margin of victory was 37.2 ppg. The Taurasi-Catchings-Chicken triumvirate once more supplied the mandatory management, however the workforce was full of so many stars that it was troublesome to think about a necessity for somebody to be out entrance. Any of the workforce members might have—and did—fill that function.
The triumph demonstrated the rising breadth of USA Basketball’s developmental skills. It’s seemingly {that a} workforce of 12 different American gamers might have received Gold, had the squad that tore by Rio stayed house. A sport that didn’t achieve Olympic acceptance till 40 years after the lads’s model debuted had surpassed its male counterpart when it comes to 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 system for fulfillment within the girls’s realm. The sport is ripening yearly on the prep, faculty and WNBA ranges, offering an countless stream of expertise for the nationwide workforce. 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 workforce ought to prepare for one more celebration this summer time.
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Photographs through Getty Pictures.
