PARIS — They played poorly in the first half against Nigeria. Like, not very good at all.
They led by 19 at the half.
This is life for the U.S. women’s national basketball team, which won its 59th consecutive Olympic game Wednesday, handling Nigeria 88-74 to advance to Friday’s semifinals, when they’ll play Australia. They’re now 76-3 all-time in Olympic play, dating back to when women’s basketball was introduced in 1976. They haven’t lost an Olympic basketball game since Aug. 5, 1992 — and I know that because I covered that game that day in Badalona, Spain.
It was late in the 1992 Summer Games. The U.S. women, like everyone else competing, were overshadowed by the NBA-dominant Dream Team. But that doesn’t mean the American women were any less expected to win the gold than the men. In their three pool games in Barcelona, they’d won by an average of 45.3 points per game. Teresa Edwards, Teresa Weatherspoon, Katrina McClain and Cynthia Cooper were all future Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famers, as was their coach, Theresa Grentz.
But they lost in the semifinals to the Unified Team, an amalgam of former Soviet Union states, 79-73. And the emotion afterward wasn’t so much anger as shock. Losing seemed impossible.
And, since ’92, it basically has…
