When celebrating a fifth Olympic gold medal, mineral water and an energy drink hardly seem worthy of the occasion. So it was fair enough that Diana Taurasi arrived in the press conference room clutching a bottle of champagne. Dismissing the sponsored offerings on the table, the Team USA veteran took a couple of swigs between answers as she discussed an astonishing personal and collective achievement.
Taurasi and Sue Bird, the teammate sat next to her, won basketball gold in Athens, Beijing, London and Rio and added Tokyo to the collection with a 90-75 victory over Japan on Sunday. They are the first basketball players to win five Olympic golds and the US now have seven successive titles.
This was the last Olympics for the 40-year-old Bird; Taurasi, a year younger, has not yet confirmed her future plans but seems likely to end on this high note. “In ’04 I was there to learn,” Bird said. “Those older players taught us what it meant. For us, hopefully we’ve left some sort of legacy for the younger players where they can carry that torch.”
When Tokyo 2020 was delayed for a year because of the pandemic and worries grew that the Games might be cancelled outright, Taurasi set up a countdown clock on her phone to whet her appetite amid the long wait: “267 days, 250 days,” she said. “Stressful. I’m happy we were here and we got it done.”
The Americans always do. But a record of consistent excellence brings its own challenges. “There’s always a lot of pressure when you put this jersey on to play at a high level and bring home the gold,” Taurasi, of the Phoenix Mercury, said. “This consumes us. It’s not like we just come out here and put the jersey on and think we’re going to win.”
Bird, of the Seattle Storm, agreed. “The Olympics is hard, guys, it’s really hard, there’s so much pressure involved,” she said. “I’m not going to miss the stress,. “So many things swirl in your head. There’s a relief that’s going to happen there for me. Because with USA basketball there is a lot of pressure.”
All the same, this event was a familiar and routine experience on the concluding day of an uncertain and dissonant Olympics. The sound of inevitability is the strains of The Star-Spangled Banner in a basketball arena during a medal ceremony. It’s hard to write about American Olympic basketball without deploying the word “consecutive” or synonyms thereof. These are not just teams, they are dynasties, reliably and relentlessly brilliant.
A day after the men took their fourth title on the trot, the women won their 55th Olympic game in a row. They were last defeated at Barcelona ’92. While the men wobbled at times and lost in the group stage to France, the nation they faced again in the final and beat 87-82, the women won all six of their matches and were only outscored in seven of 24 quarters.
It is not as if the gold medal games tend to offer much doubt or drama, either. Wide as it was, the 15-point margin of victory here was below the average of 23.4 during Team USA’s golden 25-year stretch.
Since women’s basketball entered the Olympics in 1976 the smallest winning margin in a gold medal match is seven points. That came in 1988 when the US beat Yugoslavia, 77-70. Overall the US has won nine of 12 women’s titles; the Soviet Union in 1976 and 1980 and the CIS team of former Soviet nations in 1992 claimed the others.
It is among the most dominant records in any sport. The US women’s water polo team, who won their third straight gold medal on Saturday, are in that conversation – but they did lose a game in Tokyo, their first Olympic reversal since 2008.
Still, there was novelty to be found in the identity of the US’s opponent, as Japan won its first basketball medal. They surprised France, 87-71, in their semi-final, reaching this showpiece with the help of assists from point guard Rui Machida and the three-point prowess of Yuki Miyazawa and Saki Hayashi.
But the US, with its roster of WNBA stars, defeated them 86-69 in the group stage and the rematch was equally unbalanced. Japan made only 36% of their field goal attempts and this was a a physical mismatch underlined by a 30-point haul for Brittney Griner, the 6ft8in Phoenix centre. Her team-mate A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces contributed 19 points.
The US led 50-39 at the mid-point. By then it was already evident that the biggest source of intrigue would be whether the half-time entertainment, the CUE5 robot, would sink all its shots. (It missed twice from half court and put its head in its hands before making its third attempt.)
Coached by an American, Tom Hovasse, who played two NBA games for the Atlanta Hawks in 1994, a talented and fun to watch Japan line-up was cheered on – or, more accurately, applauded in accordance with pandemic rules – by several hundred volunteers in a cavernous venue with a retractable stand that once housed a John Lennon Museum.
There was unexpected support for Bird in the stands in the shape of her fiancée, Megan Rapinoe, who won bronze in Japan with the US soccer team. “Megan somehow finagled a media credential and got herself in this arena today. We didn’t really know it was going to happen until two days ago. I feel very lucky that she was here to witness it,” Bird said. They embraced at the end. “I told her I loved her and told her I was tired.”