USA - U.S. Olympic team continues quest for Gold
The U.S. Olympic basketball team goes to Beijing with a special mission: to recapture the gold medal for the first time since 2000. The team is planning to field basketball standouts such as Carmelo Anthony, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwight Howard and Jason Kidd, and it will be directed by renowned Duke University coach Mike Krzyzewski. But experts say international basketball has changed considerably during the last decade and the Americans face steep competition.
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The U.S. Olympic basketball team goes to Beijing with a special mission: to recapture the gold medal for the first time since 2000.
The team is planning to field basketball standouts such as Carmelo Anthony, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwight Howard and Jason Kidd, and it will be directed by renowned Duke University coach Mike Krzyzewski. But experts say international basketball has changed considerably during the last decade and the Americans face steep competition.
Gold in basketball is especially important to American sports fans because they consider basketball a U.S. iconic game, along with baseball and American football. Baseball is ending its Olympic run and football was never part of the games.
Basketball is also the most international of the sports that originated in the United States. Invented by Dr. James Naismith in Massachusetts as a winter indoor workout for boarding school students, men's basketball grew in popularity in early 20th-century America, especially among city minorities.
AMATEURS ONLY
It is no wonder that since basketball's introduction to the games in 1936 America has won gold at all but four Olympics. Yet, the U.S. quest for Olympic basketball gold in 2008 will not be easy.
Until the end of the Cold War era, professional players were excluded from the Olympic Games. No National Basketball Association (NBA) stars were allowed on U.S. Olympic teams that had to face state-sponsored champions from the Soviet Union and other communist countries that were professional in all but name.
Still, great college basketball players like future U.S. Senator Bill Bradley in 1964 and Michael Jordan in 1984 led the United States to gold, but the games were relatively close. In the 1964 gold medal game, the U.S. team beat the Soviets by 14 points. In 1984, they did not have to face the Soviets because of the Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles games.
There also were times when U.S. teams did not win the gold. The most controversial game was the 1972 gold contest in Munich, Germany, which resulted in a Soviet victory. With the United States ahead by one point, the referees allowed the Soviet team three tries to inbound the ball with three seconds left. The final inbounds pass resulted in a game-winning Soviet shot.
ENTER THE DREAM TEAM
In 1988, the American team had to settle for bronze when it lost to the Soviet team in the semi-finals. But that was the last "amateurs only" year in Olympic basketball.
In 1989, FIBA (the International Basketball Federation) allowed professional players, including those in the NBA, to play at the Olympics. This decision paved the way for America's 1992 "Dream Team," considered by many the best team in basketball history. It included Michael Jordan (in his second Olympic appearance), Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, David Robinson and John Stockton, to name just a few.
Magic Johnson played for the "Dream Team" after having tested positive for the HIV virus the previous year. His participation in the Olympics helped raise international awareness and understanding of HIV/AIDS.
The entrance of the "Dream Team" into the Olympics marked a larger change in international basketball. Since 1992, NBA and major U.S. college teams have been welcoming an ever greater number of international players, thus improving the international level of basketball. For example, in the 1997-1998 season on NBA teams, there were 29 foreign-born players out of 435; in the current season, NBA rosters count 83 out of 450 as foreign-born.
NBA LIFTS THE BAR
As a result, in play after 1992, the U.S. margins of victory came to be smaller. In 1996 in Atlanta, the United States still won by large point margins. The 2000 games in Sydney, Australia, however, proved much tougher. In the semifinals, the U.S. men's team won against the Lithuanians by just two points before winning the gold in a close game against France.
In the 2004 Olympics, the U.S. team struggled in the preliminaries, losing to Puerto Rico and Lithuania. In the semifinals, it was beaten by Argentina and ended up with a bronze medal.
Is Beijing going to be a great comeback? The United States will face skillful and determined opponents. They include old acquaintances: Argentina, the 2004 Olympics winner, and Lithuania, which won bronze in 1992, 1996 and 2000. But China's team also is expected to do well, especially if the dominant Chinese center Yao Ming recovers from the injury he received in NBA play. Spain, Greece and Australia have been fielding top-notch teams as well.
Whether the United States wins the gold will be determined partly by how well Krzyzewski is able transform a diverse collection of basketball stars and mold them into a cohesive team. The competition is getting tougher, especially with most international teams fielding NBA players.
Starting with the quarterfinals, the Olympic basketball competition is a single elimination tournament, so a single loss could cost a team not only a gold medal, but a chance to win any medal at all. With so many good national Olympic basketball teams, the quest for gold in 2008 could be more unpredictable than ever.