US bastion falls, and the baton follows

US men’s basketball crumbled at the Summer Olympics like an ancient Athens temple, denied a gold medal for the first time since NBA pla...

US men’s basketball crumbled at the Summer Olympics like an ancient Athens temple, denied a gold medal for the first time since NBA players signed up in 1992. Coming into the Olympics, the Americans had compiled a 109-2 record since basketball was introduced in Berlin in 1936. After the 1988 Games, where the old Soviet Union took the gold, the Olympics flung open its doors to NBA players and the American “Dream Team” was born.

Led by Michael Jordan, an American team of NBA superstars swaggered into the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and set the US on a nearly 12-year unbeaten run that produced a perfect record of 24-0 and three gold medals — until Athens. Worshipped from Asia to Angola, even teams pummelled into submission would take their beating with a smile, players asking for autographs and happily posing for pictures with the Dream Teamers. The showboating antics and dazzling ability of those US team’s helped popularise the sport around the world and in the end contributed to their own demise.

With some NBA superstars sitting out these Olympics, the American team was a shadow of its former self, losing to Puerto Rico and Lithuania in early rounds and then crumbling like a Greek ruin with a 89-81 loss to Argentina in the semi-final.

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“Basketball is getting better because of what the Dream Team did in ’92,” said US coach Larry Brown.

“We have to realise that some of these other teams are extremely well coached and there’s some great players out there. “I think rather than knocking our guys, our league, I think we ought to give credit to the people we played against.

“We have to really think about the people we put on the team and think about the preparation that’s needed to give us the best opportunity when we have to play against great teams.”

Long before the latest edition of the team, assembled just two weeks before the Games, settled into luxury cabins on the Queen Mary II in Athens, signs of trouble had begun to appear.

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The first serious cracks in US domination came at the Sydney Olympics as the US narrowly held on to beat Lithuania in the semi-final to reach the gold medal game.

But it was at last year’s world championships on home court in Indianapolis where the US learned the game they invented was no longer their own, finishing a humiliating sixth.

Eager to re-establish themselves as the sport’s undisputed superpower, USA Basketball and the NBA vowed to assemble a squad truly worthy of the name “Dream Team” for Athens.