The 2016 USA Men's Olympic Basketball Team Is...

Going to be an interesting Team USA men's bunch to watch with no LeBron James, no James Harden, no Russell Westbrook, no Anthony Davis, no Blake Griffin, no Kawhi Leonard and no Stephon Curry on the squad due to injuries or declining to play.

But fortunately for us the USA basketball talent pool is so deep it may not matter.  They'll still have Mike Krzyzewski on the sidelines calling the plays as they seek the Olympic medal threepeat.

The 2016 Olympic squad was recently unveiled that we'll be cheering when they start play August 6 are Jimmy Butler, Kevin Durant, DeAndre Jordan, Kyle Lowry,  Harrison Barnes, DeMar DeRozan, Kyrie Irving, Klay Thompson, DeMarcus Cousins, Paul George, Draymond Green, and Carmelo Anthony, who'll be the oldest player on the squad at the ripe old age of 32.

This team may be better and more versatile than it looks, and that matters in FIBA ball.  There are two 2012 Olympians in Anthony and Durant are on this squad along with five players from the 2014 FIBA World Championship Squad. Happy to see Paul George on the team because he suffered that gruesome leg injury while trying to make the 2014 FIBA World Cup team


The assistant coaches backing up Coach K are Jim Boeheim, Tom Thibodeau and Monty Williams and will warm up for Olympic competition with a five game US tour that starts July 22 in Las Vegas against 2004 Olympic champ Argentina.  

They'll play back to back games vs. China in Los Angeles on July 24 and in Oakland on July 26, against Venezuela in Chicago on July 29 before playing their final tune up game here in Houston vs. Nigeria on August 1.    

When the Olympic tournament kicks off, they will be in Group A for pool play against Venezuela, China, Australia and the number 1 and number 2 teams from the upcoming FIBA Men's Olympic Qualifying Tournament July 4-10 in Italy, the Philippines and Serbia,

Team USA will begin Olympic pool play on August 6 against China, then play Venezuela on August 8, Australia on August 10, the OQT 2 on August 12 and finish Group A play on August 14 with OQT 1

The knockout round will start on August 17-19, with the Gold medal Game on August 21.

Here's hoping that when that game tips off at 1:45 PM CDT the USA is one of the teams in it and not in the Bronze medal game or shockingly sitting on the sidelines..   

The Olympian I Know

I look forward to watching the Olympics and  rooting for the athletes representing my country and others in various sports  

The intensity and interest goes up another notch when you actually have a personal connection with the person you're watching compete for Olympic glory

When I first started watching my then roommate pick up a sabre and start participating in various fencing tournaments inside the Kentucky Division and the Great Lakes Region, in the process of supporting my homegirl Dawn I got to meet some of the wonderful people who are part of US Fencing in that part of the world.

In addition to meeting the families, parents and friends of fencers, the 'Baby Vets' and the 'Senior Mama's, the gang at LFC, Maestro Stawicki, various officials and referees in US fencing, I also got to meet some of the up and coming US fencers when I was the announcer for the Super Youth Regional tourney that was held in Louisville in 2010.  

One of the fencing families I got to know during my time in Kentucky were the Kiefers.  Lee, her sister Alex and her baby brother are all foil fencers and pretty darned good ones.   Lee was already fencing on the international cadet level when I met them and their proud parents a few years ago.

When Dawn and I used to discuss Lee's tremendous talent or her  chances to be on or selected for a USA Olympic fencing team, we never used the word 'if' when discussing her, but 'when'  

Dawn and I along with everyone else in the Kentucky Division expected her to be in London, and here she is competing at age 18 with a 2011 Pan Am Games gold medal and a raft of cadet and junior championship medals in hand.  She also has the distinction of being only the second American woman to ever earn a medal at the senior World Fencing Championships when she picked up a bronze last October. . 

Lee made it to the quarterfinals of her first Olympic foil tournament before being ousted by the eventual silver medalist Arriana Errigo of Italy.   Lee is also a smart, super sweet person in addition to having serious fencing ability and talent.

I was up early to watch her match yesterday morning, and while I was sad she fell just short of the medal round, she made some fencing history in the process.  I have no doubts I will be seeing her again in Rio four years from now and she'll be standing on the medal platform when she competes in that 2016 tournament.

She still has the team foil event to go in a few days (August 2), so if things break her way, she may head back to Kentucky with a London Olympic medal after all.   

Congrats Lee.  It's an honor to have a personal connection with an Olympic athlete and know firsthand the levels of hard work, determination and effort it took for you to be standing on that London Olympic strip.

I'm one more person who is immensely proud of you

Olympic Gender Drama-The 1976 East German Swim Team

TransGriot Note: Another post in a series documenting the gender controversies that have occurred during the Olympic games.

During the 1976 Games in Montreal gender drama and cheating raised its head at the Olympics once again. 

The scene of this gender sports crime was Montreal's Olympic Swim Center pool and the perpetrators were the DDR government.  Also involved without their knowledge at the time, the East German women's swim team.

In the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, the USA women swimmers claimed 17 total medals- eight gold medals, five silvers and four bronzes. Of their eight gold medals, six were claimed in world record times while the other two were Olympic records.  The USA women during those Munich Games had two events in which they finished 1-2 and swept the 200m butterfly.   They also won both relays in world record times.  Two of those USA silver medals were claimed by a then 15 year old Shirley Babashoff  

The DDR during those same Munich games won zero gold medals, four silvers, and one bronze during that Olympic swimming competition with no world records

One of the East Germans collecting silvers during those games was a then 13 year old Kornelia Ender. She was responsible for three of the four silver medals the DDR girls went back to their side of the Inner German border with.  

But in the four years between the Munich and Montreal Games the East Germans starting in 1973 came out of seemingly nowhere to make dramatic improvements in their times and the color of the medals they took back home to the Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

No thanks to State Plan 14.25, the DDR's state sponsored doping program combined with their sports science rooted training methods and weightlifting regimens, they began to dominate the sport of women's swimming and the East German national anthem became a very familiar tune at those competitions.

In the 1973 FINA championships the DDR took 10 out of the 14 golds in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and two years later matched that performance in Cali, Colombia.

Then came the Montreal Olympic Games and the DDR wundermadchen total domination of the pool.   They took home a grand total of 18 medals with 11 of them being golds.  Out of the 13 events contested in the women's Olympic swim program in Montreal, only the 200m breaststroke (which was a Soviet sweep) and the 4x100 freestyle relay in which they claimed the silver eluded their grasp. 

The wundermadchen also set eight world records, equalled another one in the 100m butterfly, set three Olympic records and had five events in which DDR swimmers finished 1-2.  The East Germans also swept the medals in the 200m butterfly.


As for Kornelia Ender and Shirley Babashoff, their Olympic scripts were flipped.  The 17 year old Ender was the individual swimming star of the Montreal Games, taking home four gold medals and a silver.  She also beat Babashoff twice in their head to head individual races.  The four golds were all won in world record times.

19 year old Shirley Babashoff was aiming to be the femme version of 1972 Olympic swimming star Mark Spitz in these Montreal Games.  She was entered in five races, and in four of them except for the relay she was beaten by an East German swimming in world record time.  In addition to finishing with silver medals in her 100m and 200m freestyle races with Ender, she finished with silver medals in the 400m and 800m freestyle races won by Petra Thumer.

The lone gold for Babashoff was as a member of the 4x100 freestyle relay in which she and her American teammates upset the East Germans.  They had the added satisfaction of not only defending the gold they won in Munich and beating their Montreal tormentor Ender, but breaking the East Germans world record in the event by an astounding four seconds. 

That 1976 Olympic race is also considered the greatest ever in international women's swimming.

But people were noting not only the muscular builds of Kornelia Ender and her East German wundermadchen teammates, so was the rest of the international swimming community. 

They noted the East Germans suspiciously dramatic improvements in times in the runup to Montreal   They also noted with some sarcasm that the voices of many of the East German women were unusually deep, which is a telltale sign of the effects of steroid use in women.

When a frustrated American coach repeated the observation during the Montreal Games, an East German coach replied, "We came here to swim, not sing."

Shirley Babashoff, the USA's most decorated swimmer and a later inductee into the swimming hall of fame also noticed.  She and other frustrated American female swimmers loudly complained about what was to them obviously going on with the wundermadchen and threw some shade at their bitter East German rivals.

"To be frank, I don't think we should look like men."…
"I wouldn't want to walk around the neighborhood looking like a guy."

"That's not the way God created us – to be like that (looking like DDR Swimmers)"…
  
Babashoff was bold enough to state the obvious back then and was derided by the world press covering the Games as 'Surly Shirley' and a sore loser for it.  

She would be vindicated by the fall of the Berlin Wall 14 years later and the opening of the once secret Stasi files confirming what Babashoff was bold enough to call out in 1976.  The DDR's astounding success in the pool at the Montreal Games and in subsequent international swimming competitions through 1988 was steroid fueled. 

So IOC, I repeat the question I asked in 2008.  When are y'all going to take away the ill gotten Olympic medals the East Germans won like you swiftly have for any non-white Olympic athletes caught cheating?

That doping program not only robbed people like Babashoff, Canada's Nancy Garapicki and countless others of medals they should have earned, it also had devastating consequences for the young East German women themselves.

Their developing female bodies were given steroid cocktails and their health was sacrificed in the name of winning medals and enhancing the international sporting prestige of the DDR for propaganda purposes.
  

It also left a lot of people who finished behind those doped up DDR female swimmers, including some of the East German swimmers themselves wondering what the results would have been if there had been a clean pool in Montreal?

Olympic Gender Drama-The Press Sisters

Since we are a few months from the start of the 2012 London Olympic Games, thought I do a few posts about the gender controversies that have cropped up in past ones.

I talked about the 1936 Berlin Games in which there was gender drama on two fronts.  Nazi Germany passed off Hermann Ratjen as Dora Ratjen in order to boost their medal count and the 'That's a Man' shade that Stella Walsh threw at Helen Stephens after she beat her for the 100m gold medal and smashed her world record in the process.

The 1936 Games weren't the only ones to have a gender related controversy.  In the 1960 Olympics in Rome and the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo the gender suspicion spotlight was on the Soviet Union's golden siblings Tamara and Irina Press.

The Press sisters were dominant in the international track world at the time.  They set 26 world records between them and harvested a pile of medals for the Soviet Union from the late 50's until they both mysteriously retired from international competition before the 1966 European Championships under a cloud of suspicion.

Tamara Natanovna Press (born May 10, 1937) and her younger sibling Irina Natanovna Press (born March 10, 1939) were both born in Kharkiv in the Ukraine to Jewish parents.  While their father died during the war, they and their mother survived the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II and the four separate battles fought by the Wehrmacht and Red Army to take and retake the city between 1941-1943. 

After the war the Press sisters studied at the University of Leningrad and displayed their athletic prowess.  Tamara excelled in the discus and shot put while Irina was a hurdler and pentathlete. 

Both made their international athletic debuts at the 1958 European Championships in Stockholm, Sweden.with Tamara being more successful, winning gold in the discus and a bronze in the shot put.

At the 1960 Olympics in Rome the Press sisters became the first siblings to win gold medals in the same Olympiad when Irina equaled the then 10.6 second Olympic record in her 80m hurdle semifinal heat and then took gold in the final.  Tamara claimed a silver in the discus and then added the gold in the shot put in an Olympic record distance of 17.32 m (56 feet 10 inches).  A week after the Olympics concluded Tamara broke the world record in the discus with a 57.15 m toss (187 feet 6.5 inches)   

Tamara added 1961 and 1963 Universiade (World University Games) golds in the discus and 1962 European Championships gold medals to the Press family chest in the shot put and discus throw as both sisters continued to dominate their respective events and set world records.

Tamara stepped up her performance another level at the 1964 Tokyo Games. She not only grabbed the gold medal in the discus that eluded her in Rome with an Olympic record 57.27 m (187 feet 10.inches) throw, she repeated as the Olympic shot put champion with a golden  18.14 m (59 feet 6.35 inches) effort.

Irina narrowly missed defending her title in the 80m hurdles finishing fourth behind the other three medalists, challenged her older sister in the shot put and finished sixth but won the inaugural women's Olympic pentathlon gold by 200 points.   She broke her own pentathlon points world record in the process as the Press siblings repeated their golden sister act for the second consecutive Olympiad. 

But as the world records and medals continued to pile up for the Press siblings the whispers and rumors kept growing.  They were sarcastically misgendered as 'The Press Brothers' in the Western media and behind their backs. The rumors and speculation persisted that their record setting performances were fueled by male hormones.

The gender speculation about the Press sisters ranged from them being 'masculine looking' women to intersex to actually being genetic males.

When the loudly increasing rumors of alleged cheating by the Press siblings and other Eastern Bloc athletes became deafening, the IAAF responded by mandating women competitors be gender tested for all international events starting with the 1966 European championships taking place in Budapest, Hungary that August.

Surprisingly, the Press sisters announced their retirement from international competition weeks before that event.  The Soviets cited the reason for their retirement was needing to go back to Kharkiv to take care of their ailing mother, but the Western media skeptically thought it was very interesting timing.  

The skepticism was ossified by the fact the Press siblings never entered international competitions again, were never tested and the questions that were left unanswered by their abrupt retirement in 1966 have continued to fuel further speculation to this day.  The Press siblings however remained popular sporting figures in the Soviet Union.   

As to what happened to the Olympic champion siblings?  Irina joined the KGB and was assigned to the Border Guards while Tamara became a civil engineer who wrote several books.  Tamara Press is still alive while her sister Irina died in 2004.

But whatever the gender mystery is involving the Press siblings, it looks like those secrets will go to the grave with both of them.