Olympic Games (2020)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Basket

      Canadian Basketball Hopes a New Floor Will Raise Its Ceiling

      by

      Canada hasn’t made the Olympics in men’s basketball in two decades, but its sports officials hope a memento from the Toronto Raptors’ championship run will bring good luck.What worked for Wayne Gretzky and Canadian hockey at the 2002 Winter Olympics never quite fit the karmic ambitions of Canadian basketball officials nearly two decades later.The sacred tradition of sneakily stashing a good-luck coin beneath the playing surface did not sound as good to those antsy officials as buying a complete basketball floor for its supposed mystical properties.Gold medal triumphs for the Canadian men’s and women’s ice hockey teams in Salt Lake City in 2002 were forever linked to their so-called “lucky loonie” — a one-dollar Canadian coin secretly hidden under the ice. In a next-level spinoff this summer, when the Canadian men’s national basketball team tries to qualify for its first Olympics since the Sydney Games in 2000, it will play on the court upon which the Toronto Raptors in 2019 became the first team based outside the United States to win an N.B.A. championship.“We want the entire court to be the lucky loonie,” said Scott Lake, a board member of Canada Basketball who was instrumental in the federation’s bid to obtain that court and host a six-team Olympic men’s qualifying tournament in Victoria, British Columbia, from June 29 to July 4.Lake’s premise may strike some as over the top devotion to superstition, but he and Nick Blasko, who worked with Lake to acquire the floor, will not relent. They dreamed of bringing the event to Western Canada and were encouraged in their court crusade by Glen Grunwald, the former N.B.A. executive who became president of Canada Basketball in September 2018. Rather than question the need to go to such lengths, Grunwald lauded Lake and Blasko for “their joyful enthusiasm.”It took 11 months, and nearly $270,000 from Lake, a co-founder of the Canadian e-commerce company Shopify, to get all of the court’s puzzle pieces, but Canada Basketball conquered the logistical half of its quest. It plans to soon unveil the reassembled floor from Game 6 of the 2019 N.B.A. finals as a tribute to the Raptors’ title team, then refinish the court with FIBA logos and international basketball markings before installing it at the 7,400-seat Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre in Victoria.The visiting Raptors clinched the championship with a win against the Golden State Warriors in Game 6 of the 2019 N.B.A. finals in Oakland, Calif. Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE, via Getty ImagesThe Raptors were underdogs in the 2019 N.B.A. finals against Golden State and its starry lineup led by Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson, but they won the title in six games, helped along by injuries to Durant and Thompson and clinching the series on the road at Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif. The qualifying tournament will be the biggest international basketball event held in Canada since the FIBA world championships in Toronto in 1994.“We wanted to get a floor with a story,” Blasko said. “We wanted a floor that has some significance and meaning to our country.”Raptors Coach Nick Nurse, who doubles as Canada’s national team coach, endorsed the creativity as heartily as Grunwald.“I couldn’t believe it when they told me what they were trying,” Nurse said. “It’s a great story. Hopefully we can deliver another big accomplishment on that floor and make our own history for Canadian basketball.”Six months of negotiations to purchase the floor, then five months of scrambling to acquire the correct center court panels, were rooted in the same philosophy as the Canadian federation’s determination to have Nurse coach the national team: Any connection to Toronto’s championship stirs warm, hopeful vibes.Lake and Blasko took great pride in persuading the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority to sell them the Game 6 floor for $250,000 — especially after hearing that it was earmarked to be sold to a company that planned to turn it into beer tap handles for local breweries. The serendipitous intervention of Golden State’s operations director, David Marsh, a fellow Canadian, was equally vital after it was discovered that the 16 panels for the Game 6 center circle, which reads “The Town,” were missing.Golden State had kept those panels after the 2018-19 season and shipped them to Idaho in 2020 to have them sanded down for potential use on a floor at their new arena in San Francisco. Marsh got the panels back and sold them on Golden State’s behalf to the Friends of Victoria Basketball, as the local organizing committee is known, in November 2020 for another $18,750 from Lake.No measure seemed too extreme when the Canadians considered the floor’s value to the country as a sporting keepsake, irrespective of the qualifying tournament or any perceived mystique.The floor was off-loaded from a truck last summer.Canada BasketballThe court was reassembled before heading to its final destination.Canada Basketball“There was a huge inflection point for basketball in this country in 2019,” Lake said. “That Raptors championship was a unifying force for all of Canada.”The winner from the qualifying tournament in Victoria will get one of four remaining berths in the men’s Olympic basketball tournament this summer in Tokyo. If you dare to buy into the mythology of the stacks of wood panels that were collecting dust in storage, resurrecting this floor will give Canada an even bigger home-court advantage than anticipated when it hosts China, Czech Republic, Turkey, Uruguay and Greece, which is coached by Rick Pitino.Canada last qualified for the Olympics in men’s basketball 21 years ago — led by Victoria’s favorite son. Nets Coach Steve Nash, who grew up in Victoria in what was regarded as a remote basketball outpost on Vancouver Island, steered an unremarkable squad with only one other N.B.A. player (Todd MacCulloch) to within one win of the medal round.The current Victoria organizers, determined to help the program end that drought, paid 3.1 million Canadian dollars, about $2.5 million, to host one of four six-team qualifiers alongside three perennial European basketball powers: Serbia, Lithuania and Croatia. Then they moved on to brainstorming for new concepts to generate optimum karma, real or imagined, and felt an unshakable impulse to stretch the traditional Gretzky script.Canada’s men’s ice hockey gold in 2002 was its first in 50 years. Gretzky, as the executive director of the team, was handed the loonie that had been strategically submerged before those Olympics by a Canadian crew in charge of managing the Salt Lake City ice. That coin became known back home as the ultimate lucky charm and wound up in the Hockey Hall of Fame.To make good on the good-luck plan Lake and Blasko hatched and qualify for Tokyo on that 2019 N.B.A. finals floor, Canada will have to overcome a reputation in recent years for squandering its rising talent. Expectations have never been higher given that Canada, with 17 players on opening night N.B.A. rosters, accounted for more international players in the league than any other country. Yet the scars from four successive failed qualifying campaigns run deep.Pieces of the floor waiting to be assembled last summer at the Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre in Victoria.Canada BasketballThe Raptors’ title run and the gargantuan television audiences it attracted have led Grunwald to proclaim, as he did in a recent phone interview, that “this is a basketball nation now.” Other prominent members of the Canadian basketball community say the same. The surest way to hush lingering skeptics would be to send men’s and women’s national teams to Tokyo, but no one is quite sure what sort of team Nurse will get to coach. Canada’s women, led by the W.N.B.A.’s Kia Nurse (no relation to the men’s coach) and ranked No. 4 in the world, are regarded as medal contenders.Jamal Murray, Canada’s best men’s player, could make a deep run in the N.B.A. playoffs with the Denver Nuggets, potentially precluding a national team stint. Golden State’s Andrew Wiggins, another top talent, hasn’t played for Canada since 2015. And Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Oklahoma City’s blossoming guard, has been sidelined by plantar fasciitis in his right foot, which could complicate Canada’s efforts to sell him on the off-season rigors of international basketball.“We got an all-N.B.A. team,” the Knicks’ RJ Barrett, who is Canadian, said last month, insisting they will have enough to qualify no matter who plays.Lake and Blasko know this much: They can’t do any more to enhance the team’s chances.“For the people in Oakland, it was just the floor that was taking up space that they were probably never going to use again,” Lake said. “For us, it’s the most important floor in Canadian basketball history.”Hyperbole? Not to Grunwald. A slew of loonie placements and derivative concepts since 2002 have failed to deliver any Canadian sports magic — including when Masai Ujiri, Toronto’s president of basketball operations, placed a two-dollar Canadian toonie coin under the team’s practice court in Tampa, Fla., in December. It still has been, to put it mildly, an arduous pandemic season for the displaced Raptors, but Grunwald just chuckled as he recounted Lake and Blasko’s persistence.Nearly eight years removed from his last taste of the N.B.A., with the Knicks, Grunwald said he couldn’t help but get swept up in “the joy they have for basketball.”“It’s really refreshing,” Grunwald said. “It makes you feel good about our sport and about Canada.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Soccer

      U.S. Men Fail to Qualify for Olympic Soccer Tournament

      by

      Honduras dashes the Americans’ hopes of a trip to Tokyo, the latest in a string of qualifying failures for U.S. Soccer.The United States failed in its latest bid to qualify for the Olympic men’s soccer tournament on Sunday, falling to Honduras, 2-1, in a regional qualifying tournament in Mexico. A goalkeeping blunder proved to be the difference this time, but the feeling — and the frustration — was all too familiar.The defeat was a humbling end to yet another Olympic qualifying campaign for the United States men, and it means the Americans will miss their third straight Summer Games. A United States men’s team last appeared in the Olympics in 2008, and now has failed to qualify for the Games in four of the past five cycles.Goals by Honduras on either side of halftime — a bundled finish by the Brooklyn-born striker Juan Carlos Obregón Jr. in first-half stoppage time and a deflected goal as a disastrous mistake by goalkeeper David Ochoa minutes into the second half — proved decisive, and sent the Hondurans to their fourth straight Olympics. Honduras finished fourth in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, losing to the eventual champion, Brazil, in the semifinals.“The goal was to qualify for the Olympics, and we didn’t get the job done today,” defender Henry Kessler said.Mexico beat Canada, 2-0, in the tournament’s second semifinal to claim its third straight berth in the Summer Games.U.S. Soccer will still have a representative in Tokyo: Its world champion women’s team qualified last year and will be a favorite to claim its fifth gold medal in the sport when the Olympics open in July. American men’s teams have played in the Olympics four times but have never won a medal.Defender Justin Glad with Juan Carlos Obregón Jr. of Honduras, which was bidding for its fourth straight Olympic berth.Henry Romero/Reuters“Obviously, we’re devastated, absolutely devastated,” United States Coach Jason Kreis said. “In our locker room, the guys are like it’s a tragedy — a tragedy.”Unlike most tournaments, the Olympic qualifying event is all about the semifinals. In CONCACAF, the region that includes teams from North and Central America and the Caribbean, only the two semifinal winners advance to Tokyo, making victory in one of those matches the goal and rendering the final — Honduras will play the host Mexico on Tuesday — an afterthought.The make-or-break semifinal game played out under a scorching sun in Guadalajara, Mexico, where the temperature was 90 degrees at kickoff. The game paused for hydration breaks in each half.The Americans tried to take control early, and produced two good scoring chances. But as Honduras held firm and settled in, the Americans seemed to run short of energy and ideas. Honduras took the lead four minutes into first-half injury time, with a long, inch-perfect cross-field pass headed expertly into the path of a charging Obregón in the goal mouth. Using his thigh, and then his hip, he clumsily muscled it over the line past Ochoa in goal.Honduras doubled its lead less than three minutes into the second half when Ochoa — under dutiful but minimal pressure — drove a pass off forward Luis Palma that ricocheted into his own net. Scrambling to his feet, Ochoa quickly fished the ball out of his net, but the Americans’ day suddenly had taken on a grim aura.Midfielder Jackson Yueill, the United States captain, got a goal back in the 52nd minute with a rocketed shot from just outside the circle atop the Honduran penalty area. And Jonathan Lewis had three excellent chances to tie the score — one on a header cleared off the line, another lost to a mystery foul spotted by the Salvadoran referee — as the tension built and the time ticked away. But the goals the United States needed never arrived.The two games in Mexico on Sunday completed the 16-team Olympic men’s field, which already includes teams like host Japan; Brazil (the gold medalist at home in 2016) and Argentina from South America; France, Germany, Romania and Spain from Europe; Egypt, South Africa and Ivory Coast from Africa; Australia, Saudi Arabia and South Korea from Asia; and New Zealand from Oceania.Jonathan Lewis had several chances to score in the second half.Henry Romero/ReutersThe Olympic men’s tournament has been an under-23 championship since 1992, an accommodation with FIFA, the sport’s global governing body, to maintain the primacy of the World Cup as the sport’s showcase event. (The women’s Olympic tournament is, like the Women’s World Cup, contested by senior national teams.)But it remains an important barometer of a country’s ability to produce young talent, and for a regional force like the United States, which was still reckoning with its senior national team’s stunning failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, missing out again and again had become a referendum on the nation’s soccer progress.Once a regular in the men’s event, the United States last appeared in it at the 2008 Beijing Summer Games, when it won only its opening game against Japan, tumbled out after the group stage and finished ninth. But soon, missing the Olympics troublingly became the norm. The Americans, who had failed to qualify for the 2004 Athens Games, then missed out on both the London Olympics in 2012 and the Rio Games in 2016.Honduras took the lead on a goal seconds before the halftime whistle.Henry Romero/ReutersU.S. Soccer made reversing that recent history a priority this year. It hired Kreis, a veteran of several head coaching jobs in Major League Soccer, to lead the team, and tried to take full advantage of some of the talent produced by the league’s recent investments in player development. All 11 United States starters on Sunday play for teams in M.L.S., but some of the country’s best under-23 talent that — European pros like Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie, Sergiño Dest and Gio Reyna, among others — were unavailable because their European clubs were under no obligation to release them for Olympic qualifying play.Still, the Americans beat Costa Rica (1-0) and thumped the Dominican Republic (4-0) in their first two games before an errant pass led to a first-half goal, and a 1-0 defeat against Mexico, in their group-stage finale. The defeat was a blow to the United States team’s momentum, and perhaps to its psyche, as it represented the team’s first big test of the event, but Kreis moved quickly to dismiss it and turn his team’s focus to the semifinal.“I think we’ve been searching for a little more sharpness in this whole tournament,” Kreis said after the loss. But the only thing that mattered, he added, was not that result but that “the most important game is coming.”It came on Sunday. And the Americans lost it. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Golf

      For Korea’s Golfers Eyeing the Olympics, More Than Four Is a Crowd

      by

      Each country can send only four women to Tokyo, and with six Korean golfers in the world’s top 15, just making the team can feel harder than winning gold.RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. — So Yeon Ryu is a two-time major winner and a former world No. 1 who entered this week’s ANA Inspiration, the first L.P.G.A. major of the year, as a top 20 player. Ryu’s credentials for the Tokyo Olympics this summer are solid gold.Her passport is her problem.Ryu is from South Korea, where champion women golfers are an abundant natural resource. With three months until the team rosters for the delayed Summer Games in Tokyo are finalized, Ryu is No. 16 in the world but No. 7 in her homeland.The Olympic qualification standards dictate that every player in the top 15 is eligible to compete but that no country can have more than four representatives in the 60-player field. Led by Jin Young Ko, Koreans hold the top three spots.“I don’t know that there’s a harder team in sport to make right now,” said Mike Whan, the departing L.P.G.A. commissioner.In 2016, when golf returned to the Olympics as a medal sport for the first time since 1904, Ryu missed a berth on the South Korean team despite a top-12 world ranking.“It’s tougher to make the team from my country than to win the gold medal,” said Ryu, who opened with an even-par 72 Thursday at Mission Hills. Patty Tavatanakit of Thailand shot a six-under-par 66 to lead the field.South Korean champions have been plentiful over the past decade, capturing 23 of the 47 L.P.G.A. majors contested. They occupy 14 of the top 35 spots in the world rankings. For players desiring to distinguish themselves, making the Olympic team is a priority.“So many players are playing so well from Korea that I want to say people back home are less appreciative to see what we’re doing on the tour,” said Ryu, 30, whose major titles came at the 2011 United States Women’s Open and the 2017 ANA Inspiration, both in playoffs. “They’re more keen to see the Olympics because they know it’s really, really tough to make the team.”Inbee Park, Ryu’s best friend and compatriot, won the women’s competition at the Rio Olympics, by five strokes over New Zealand’s Lydia Ko, then the top-ranked player. With the country’s team members all so highly ranked, Korean officials were confident of at least one medal in the women’s competition. Park overcame a wrist injury that had slowed her progress all year and delivered on the expectations.No stranger to the spotlight, she took the golf world on a thrilling ride in 2013 when she won the first three majors in a bid to become the first professional, male or female, to win four in the same year. But never, Park said, had she felt more pressure. After arriving in Brazil, Park absorbed the sense of urgency radiated by the archers, the swimmers, the taekwondo athletes and the handball players representing Korea who have one chance every four years to craft their legacies.“You get so much attention from the people and the country and from everyone pretty much,” Park, now 32 and a seven-time major champion, said this week. “I think it’s double, triple, probably 10 times more pressure than I ever felt in a major championship.”Whan said the telecast of Park’s final round drew a 27.1 rating in South Korea. To put that in context, he said, Park’s unsuccessful bid for history at the 2013 Women’s British Open — she finished 14 strokes behind the winner, Stacy Lewis — got an 8, which was roughly the same as the rating for Tiger Woods’s victorious final round at the 2019 Masters.“So imagine Tiger at Augusta times three,” Whan said. “She went from being a really noteworthy golfer to being one of the most famous people in Korea in one weekend.”Ryu didn’t plan to watch any of the 2016 Olympics coverage. “I was so close to making the team that it definitely hurt for me,” Ryu said. “I wanted to avoid it as much as I can.”She added, “But when you know your best friend is rocking it in Rio, you have to watch.”Ryu was glad she saw Park clinch the gold. She credits Park’s performance in the Olympics with her own victory at Mission Hills and ascent to No. 1 the following year.“Before Rio I was maybe so afraid, ‘What is going to happen if I miss the Olympics?’” Ryu said. “So I almost just wanted to believe winning a major is better than the Olympics.”She added: “After Inbee won the gold medal, I was definitely jealous — not of her but because I felt she did something that was big for the whole golf industry. Maybe that motivation really helped me to play well in 2017.”Inbee Park, right, with Chun Lee-Kyung, a four-time Olympic champion in short-track speed skating, during the opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics. Park saw her stardom explode after she won gold at the Rio Games. Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIn 2018, South Korea hosted the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. In a nod to her new stature, Park was chosen as one of the final torch bearers. As she ran with the flame into the Olympic Stadium, slowly to avoid tripping in conditions so cold she could hardly feel her feet, her friend Ryu sat awe-struck in the crowd of 35,000.After being so near the top 10 and still so far from qualifying for the 2016 Olympics, Ryu recognized it might be her only chance to experience an Olympics up close. More