WINNING, MOSTLY
The United States experienced plenty of ups and downs at the Tokyo Games, but it also showed remarkable tenacity under unprecedented circumstances.
Team USA leaves Tokyo with over 100 medals for fifth straight Olympics despite adversity.
TOKYO — United States athletes will leave the 2021 Tokyo Games with more than a hundred medals for the fifth consecutive Olympics, but the road to triple digits, as usual, took some unexpected swerves along the way.
The U.S. contingent in recent years has been top-heavy in a few sports — swimming, track and field, gymnastics and basketball being the most consistently dominant — and that pattern held true even in the abnormal Pandemic Games of 2021.
Those four sports have accounted for 65 of 111 medals after the women’s basketball team won the gold Sunday against host Japan.
The U.S. will be shut out, meanwhile, in about half of the 46 sports on the Olympic program.
The team entered the final day with 108 medals — 36 gold, 39 silver and 33 bronze — to outdistance China’s 87, although the Chinese had 38 golds entering Sunday’s finals.
The U.S. won a record 121 medals in 2016 in Rio, including 46 gold. With 339 events in Tokyo — including the addition of U.S.-centric sports like skateboarding and surfing along with the return of baseball and softball — the expectations were hard to gauge because of the extra year before the Games and the uncertainty of COVID-19.
“Given the high degree of uncertainty until recently about whether these Games would even happen, the detraining when the Games got postponed, and then retraining, and then focus on trials, and then coming here and working through all the countermeasures and the guidelines and the testing, in the face of all that, to perform as well as we did, I am incredibly proud of this team,” Rick Adams, chief of sport performance for the Olympic committee, told the New York Times.
The sharpest takeaway from Team USA’s Tokyo performance likely will involve the men’s track and field program. The U.S. men did not win an individual gold medal, pending the outcome of Sunday’s marathon, and their one team victory (in the 4x400-meter relay) did not come until the last event of Saturday night’s program.
That shortcoming has not escaped the notice of observers such as Carl Lewis, the nine-time gold medalist who vented his frustration last week on the 4x100-meter relay team when it failed to advance to the final eight even while completing the race without a baton drop.
Lewis took to Instagram on Friday for a 30-minute discourse on the state of USA Track and Field’s sprint program that emphasized his support for the athletes while repeating his opinion that changes need to be made in planning and administration.
His primary suggestion was to compile a manual on relay techniques that would become standard among USA Track and Field athletes, emphasizing standards and practices that could become second nature to generations of sprinters while also leaving room to adjust to individual preferences.
“We’re putting the athletes in a difficult situation, and I want to make sure that (they) understand that I’m trying to help put them in a place where they can be the best they can be,” Lewis said. “Let’s get the system in place, and then it will be much easier for the athletes.”
Lewis also said he is not interested in becoming a coach for USA Track and Field, adding, “I have a great job at the University of Houston. I love doing what I do.”
At the other end of the spectrum in terms of Olympic success compared with expectations was the U.S. wrestling team, which went from three medals in 2016 to nine in Tokyo with four wrestlers still in action Sunday.
That total includes three golds, one of them won by Tamyra Mensah-Stock
of Katy in women’s freestyle. Mensah-Stock is the 2019 world champion and has said she intends to continue in the sport through the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Gymnastics, meanwhile, went from 10 medals to six in Tokyo in the wake of Simone Biles’ inability to compete in all of her scheduled events because of problems with air-to-ground awareness.
Biles has not said if she plans to compete as an all-arounder or event specialist in Paris. As for the other five members of the team, MyKayla Skinner is retiring from elite gymnastics, and the others, including all-around gold medalist Suni Lee, are headed to college.
Those losses, coupled with the continued questions surrounding USA Gymnastics as it deals with the aftermath of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal, make for a cloudy forecast three years out from Paris.
USA Swimming, by contrast, remains the strongest unit in the sport, but the emergence of young athletes worldwide in the wake of the year’s delay in the Games helped scramble the competition in Tokyo.
With five gold medals, Caeleb Dressel was the standard-bearer for the first USA Swimming team since 1996 without Michael Phelps. Katie Ledecky, who won two golds and two bronze medals, is 24 and should be in the forefront of the sport for years to come, and 2016 gold medalist Simone Manuel has said she intends to keep swimming through the 2032 Olympics.
There were also surprises in the pool like Bobby Finke, who came from behind twice to win golds in the 800 and 1,500 freestyles. The team had 16 newcomers, its largest crop of Olympic debuts for some time, including 11 teenagers. It finished with 30 medals, compared with 33 in Rio, and 11 gold medals, compared with 16 five years ago.
The U.S. women’s soccer team, the two-time defending World Cup champions, lost twice and settled for a bronze medal, and American rowers failed to make the podium for the first time since 2008.
U.S. athletes also medaled in the new sports of 3-on-3 basketball, karate, surfing and sports climbing and has produced medals in baseball, beach volleyball, boxing, canoeing, cycling, diving, equestrian, fencing, golf, softball, triathlon, water polo and weightlifting.