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A night to remember
Team USA survived a scare on Thursday, erasing a 17-point deficit to beat Serbia, 95-91, and advance to tomorrow’s gold medal game against host nation France.
A finish for the ages: The Americans trailed by 13 points entering the fourth quarter. That’s when they turned it on — playing off each other beautifully, barely running plays and ultimately pulling away from Nikola Jokić and his fellow Serbs.
From Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel:
LeBron, Steph and KD, a generation of otherworldly talent. They own eight MVPs and 10 NBA titles between them. All the victories. All the buzzer-beaters. All the Game 7s, sometimes even against each other.
And yet, in the end, there was this. James is 39, Curry 36 and Durant 35, and it is quite possible that when it is all said and done in their legendary careers, what transpired here in a wild, overwrought Bercy Arena in the semifinals of the Olympics will go down as one of their favorite, if not most prideful memories.
The Olympics used to be a three-week vacation where you showed up, showed out and left with gold. Now, it’s a rock fight that tests even the greatest of the greats.
What they’re saying: “That was special,” said Curry, who finished with a game-high 36 points (12-19 FG, 9-14 3PT). “This is the most fun I’ve had in a very long time.”
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“I’m 39 years old,” said James, who had a triple-double (16-12-10). “I don’t know how many opportunities and moments I’m going to get like this, to be able to compete for something big.”
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“Everybody in here is going to remember this night for the rest of their lives,” said Durant, who was clutch down the stretch. “We showed how together we were in that fourth quarter.”
The last word: “It’s one of the greatest basketball games I’ve ever been a part of,” added head coach Steve Kerr. “I’m really humbled to have been a part of this game.”
Further reading: Curry for President! Steph saves Team USA
Photos of the day
🔥 A league of her own: Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone smashed her own world record by 0.28 seconds (50.37) to take gold in the 400m hurdles, winning by an astonishing 1.5 seconds over fellow American Anna Cockrell (silver). Her time was so fast she would have qualified for the 400m final — the race without 10 hurdles.
🇧🇼 Tebogo upsets Lyles: Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo became Africa’s first 200m gold medalist, upsetting Americans Kenny Bednarek (silver) and Noah Lyles (bronze), who was uncharacteristically winded after being diagnosed with COVID on Tuesday.
🥇 A golden leap: Tara Davis-Woodhall, the free-spirited, cowboy hat-wearing long jumper who finished sixth in Tokyo, blew away the field to win gold with a jump of 7.10 meters (23.3 feet). No one else even broke seven meters.
📸 What a shot: Sports photography remains undefeated.
Day 13 recap: More from Thursday
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Athlete spotlight: Kristen Faulkner is the first American woman to win gold in multiple disciplines at the same Olympics, winning both the individual road race and the team pursuit on the track. Not bad for someone who took up cycling just seven years ago.
Historic double: On Sunday, Faulkner pulled off a stunning upset for Team USA’s first road race gold since 1984 (men or women) despite only earning a spot in the race as a replacement. On Wednesday, she helped the U.S. win its first team pursuit gold since the event debuted in 2012.
From rower, to VC, to cycling champ: Faulkner grew up in the tiny fishing community of Homer, Alaska, and rowed competitively at Harvard before graduating in 2016 and moving to New York City to begin a finance career.
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In 2017, while working at a venture capital firm, she took a beginner’s cycling class in Central Park and immediately got hooked, waking up at 5am to bike through the park each day before work.
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By 2020 she’d joined a professional cycling team and was still working part-time as a VC (while racing abroad in Europe!) until 2021, when she left the corporate world to focus on cycling full time.
Get this: Faulkner is so new to cycling that her parents had never seen her race in a velodrome (indoor cycling track) until this week in Paris.
More athletes in action:
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💪 Raven Saunders: The “masked shot putter” uses the pronouns they and them and brings a distinctive style to every meet. The 28-year-old Ole Miss grad and three-time Olympian won silver in Tokyo and goes for gold today.
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👟 Rai Benjamin: No one has run the 400m hurdles faster this year than the 27-year-old New York native, who’s looking for gold today after taking silver in Tokyo. His biggest competition? Norway’s Karsten Warholm, the world record holder who beat him in Tokyo.
Best of Team USA social: Women’s volleyball advances to the final … Soccer stars love track … Sha’Carri’s anchor leg
Team USA: News | Athletes | Shop
Follow along at TeamUSA.com and @TeamUSA on social media.
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Full medal count.
Watchlist: Khelif goes for gold
Despite being assigned female at birth and competing against women all her life, Imane Khelif’s gender eligibility has been one of the biggest stories of these Games. Today, the 25-year-old Algerian boxer fights China’s Yang Liu for welterweight gold (4:50pm ET, Peacock).
Featured events:
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👟 Track & Field: Women’s 4x100m Relay Final (1:30pm, NBC); Men’s 4x100m Relay Final (1:45pm, NBC); Women’s 400m Final (2pm, NBC); Women’s 10,000m Final (3pm, NBC); Men’s 400m Hurdles Final (3:45pm, NBC)
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🏀 Women’s Basketball: USA vs. Australia (11:30am, NBC); France vs. Belgium (3pm, Peacock) … Semifinals.
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🤸 Breaking: Women’s Final (2pm, E!) … Qualifiers begin at 10am.
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🤽♂️ Men’s Water Polo: USA vs. Serbia (8:35am, Peacock); Hungary vs. Croatia (1:35pm, Peacock) … Semifinals.
Medal events:
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🛶 Canoe Sprint: Men’s Double 500m Final and Single 1000m Final (7:20am, E!)
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🏑 Women’s Field Hockey: Argentina vs. Belgium for Bronze (8am, Peacock); Netherlands vs. China for Gold (2pm, Peacock)
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🎗️ Rhythmic Gymnastics: Individual All-Around Final (8:30am, Peacock)
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🌊 Diving: Women’s 3m Springboard Final (9am, NBC)
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⚽️ Soccer: Spain vs. Germany for Women’s Bronze (9am, USA); Spain vs. France for Men’s Gold (12pm, USA)
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🏓 Table Tennis: China vs. Sweden for Men’s Team Gold (9am, Peacock)
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🏋️ Weightlifting: Men’s 89kg (9am, Peacock); Women’s 71kg (1:30pm, Peacock)
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🏐 Men’s Volleyball: USA vs. Italy for Bronze (10am, Peacock)
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🚴♂️ Track Cycling: Men’s Sprint and Women’s Madison Finals (12pm, Peacock)
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🤼 Wrestling: Men’s 57kg, Men’s 86kg and Women’s 57kg Finals (12:15pm, Peacock)
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👟 Track & Field: Women’s Shot Put Final (1:35pm, Peacock); Men’s Triple Jump Final (2:15pm, Peacock); Women’s Heptathlon 800m Final (2:25pm, NBC)
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🥋 Taekwondo: Women’s 67kg and Men’s 80kg Finals (2:15pm, Peacock)
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🏐 Beach Volleyball: Women’s Bronze Medal Match (3pm, USA) and Gold Medal Match (4:30pm, NBC)
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🥊 Boxing: Men’s Welterweight (3:30pm, Peacock); Women’s Flyweight (3:45pm, Peacock); Men’s Heavyweight (4:30pm, Peacock)
Non-medal events: Artistic Swimming, Handball, Modern Pentathlon.
Primetime (NBC): Women’s 3m Springboard Final and Women’s Beach Volleyball Gold Medal Match (8pm), Women’s Shot Put Final, Women’s 400m Final, Men’s 400m Hurdles Final and Women’s Breaking Final (9pm).
For a complete schedule, click here. Every event streams live on Peacock. Sign up here.
Breaking makes its debut
The last of 45 sports to begin here in Paris is something that many wouldn’t consider a sport at all: Breaking, popularly known as breakdancing, makes its Olympics debut today.
From Yahoo Sports’ Henry Bushnell:
Breaking, in its original form, was an art born in 1970s New York. It migrated from parties to the streets, became one of the four pillars of hip-hop, went mainstream in the 1980s … and then sort of died off.
But it didn’t die out. It went underground, then international. It mutated and gave rise to a competitive circuit, where breakers would battle and be judged. That’s the type of competition that, a couple decades later, is coming to the Olympics.
To the dancers and anybody in the community, it’s “breaking.” To your very confused aunt, it’s probably “breakdancing,” because that’s the term mainstream American media coined in the ’80s. But the original term, and the one used here at the Olympics, is “breaking.”
“I don’t like the term breakdancing, because that’s what media gave us,” U.S. Olympic breaker Jeffrey Louis, aka B-boy Jeffro, said. “Like, that’s what everybody know, that’s what the masses know. [But] it’s called breaking.”
How it works: The Olympic competition is a series of head-to-head battles, with a preliminary “round robin” (two rounds) followed by the knockout stage (three rounds). In each round, one breaker performs for about 45 seconds; then the other responds. Judges use five subjective criteria — execution, musicality, originality, technique and vocabulary — to declare a winner.
Further reading: Would you quit a six-figure job to breakdance in the Olympics? That’s what Sunny Choi did
Lightning round
🇫🇷 100 years later: Netherlands beat Germany in Thursday’s men’s field hockey final at Stade Yves du Manoir, best known as the site of the 1924 Olympics and the “Chariots of Fire” races.
🥉 World record, bronze medal: American speed climber Sam Watson climbed a 49-foot overhanging wall in 4.74 seconds, a new world record, but had to settle for bronze.
🇮🇳 Phogat says farewell: India’s Vinesh Phogat retired from wrestling one day after she was disqualified from the women’s 50kg gold medal match for failing the weigh-in by 100 grams (roughly the weight of two eggs).
Daily trivia
Five of the last eight players to win NBA MVP were on the court during the USA-Serbia game (James, Durant, Curry, Embiid, Jokić).
Question: Can you name the three who weren’t?
Answer at the bottom.
In non-Olympics news…
💔 Tragedy at the CrossFit Games: Serbia’s Lazar Đukić drowned in a lake during the competition’s first event in Fort Worth, Texas, which included a half-mile swim. He was 28.
Plus:
Trivia answer: Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Giannis Antetokounmpo
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Source Agencies
