In 2015, the American sprinter Justin Gatlin had been on fire. He came into the track and field world championships that August at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing having run the 100-meter dash in 9.74 seconds in May and then 9.75 twice, once in June and again in July.
In the world semifinals, Gatlin ran 9.77. He was, as he had been all season, the heavy favorite for gold.
In the final, nearing the finish line, Gatlin’s form caught just enough to throw him off stride. Jamaica’s Usain Bolt won the race, in 9.79. Gatlin finished in 9.80.
That race would prove emblematic of the American performance at those 2015 championships. The U.S. team won just 18 medals, only six gold. Kenya and Jamaica won more gold, both seven. Now, with the Tokyo Olympics coming up, the question is whether that 2015 trip to Asia was an aberration for the American team or whether it’s a signal of what’s to come this summer.
And, for that matter, next February — at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games.
The finish of the Beijing 2015 men’s 100 // Getty Images
For starters, in the Summer Games, the focus, as ever, is on track and field and in swimming, the two sports that dominate the medals count.
There can be little question the Chinese are rising. They have long understood the use of Olympic sport as a projection of soft power. Their resource, government-funded, is — to use a word — formidable.
Meantime, the Japanese are hugely likely to overperform in Tokyo, as the home team almost always does at a home Olympics; Japan can boast real talent in both swimming and at the track. Then there are the Australians, who like the Japanese and Chinese have the benefit of a time-zone advantage. They are poised to resume a long-running rivalry with the Americans in the pool, with the likes of Ariarne Titmus taking on Katie Ledecky.
American officials — at USA Swimming, USA Track & Field and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee — have projected confidence, saying they expect the U.S. team, once again, to win the medals count.
But.
The U.S. swim team seemingly has escaped any sort of trouble by virtue of having traveled to Asia. At the 2011 world championships in Shanghai, for instance, at the pool Team USA won 29 medals, 16 gold; at the 2019 world championships in Gwangju, South Korea, the Americans won 26, 13 gold, and saw the emergence of sprinter Caeleb Dressel.
At both meets, the Americans were best in the world.
This go-around, the U.S. swim team is already halfway to Japan — practicing, as a team, in Hawaii.
But.
It’s plain that 26 is three fewer than 29. And just as in 2019, neither Michael Phelps nor Ryan Lochte, mainstays on the men’s team for roughly 20 years, will swim in Tokyo. The women’s team, with an infusion of teen and college talent, would appear to be strong; the men’s, with Dressel, backstroker Ryan Murphy and medley champion Chase Kalisz, is otherwise largely unproven. The relays, long a U.S. mainstay — on both sides — are hardly a given for gold, and in some cases medals.
In Tokyo, 26 medals might yet be achievable again.
Or — it might prove a reach.
The track team, meanwhile, has shown marked improvement at recent “major” events, a “major” being a world championship or Olympic Games.
Over eight world majors, from 2004 through 2013, Team USA (the track and field version) averaged 25 medals. After winning 25 at the Beijing 2008 Games with hopes of 30 (note: Asia), then-USATF leadership commissioned a report, Project 30, that concluded, among other things: “American athletes as a group do not conduct themselves as true professionals and USATF does not hold them to professional standards.”
Over three world majors from 2016 to 2019, under the leadership of chief executive Max Siegel, who took over in 2012, Team USA averaged 30.3. The 32 medals at the Rio 2016 Games were seven higher than average and three higher than the best since 2004, and discounting the boycott-marked 1984 Games, the most medals ever won by Team USA at a Summer Games.
The outlier: 2015, Beijing.
Asia.
More numbers.
Gracenote predicts the U.S. team will top the Tokyo medals table, with 114 overall, 43 gold. It sees China in second with 85, 38 gold.
This would mark the seventh straight Summer Games at which the American team would be No. 1 in the medals count.
In Rio, the U.S. team won 121 overall, 46 gold. China won 70, 26 gold.
The Gracenote Tokyo predictions — if accurate — are likely to be seen and accepted by most as evidence that, again, Team USA is the boss.
What they really show is American slippage and, as is evident, a China surge.
Here’s why:
The Rio Games featured 306 medal events, including two new sports, rugby sevens and golf.
Tokyo will see 339 and five additions to the program: surf, skate, sport climbing, karate and baseball/softball.
So — for the Americans — 121 in 306 versus 114 in 339. (Again: these are Gracenote predictions.)
For the Chinese — 70 climbing to 85. With Paris 2024 on the horizon. And, after that, LA28.
For Team USA overall, anchored by swim and track, these Tokyo Games mark a key inflection point, and for a variety of different and seemingly unrelated but, in the end, interconnected reasons.
First and foremost, COVID-19. Nobody knows what effect, if any, the virus will have on the U.S. team and the Games. Gracenote says Tokyo is “likely to be the most unpredictable Olympics ever.”
Next:
How the movement for social and racial justice prompted by the murder of George Floyd — and the International Olympic Committee’s move to allow some athlete expression but keep it off the podium — will play out.
Moving on;
Virtually no one in senior leadership at the USOPC has been through even one edition of an Olympics before. It’s unclear what that will mean, if anything, for athlete performance going through what promises to be the most challenging Games of the modern era.
Further:
For nearly five years, since the first Indianapolis Star story on Larry Nassar, a series of wrenching and traumatic changes — leadership, cultural, political and more — have buffeted the U.S. Olympic landscape. Yet it is also perhaps the reality that for most Americans, the Summer Olympics remains a once-every-four- (and in this case, five-) year event that means tales of hopes, dreams and, to be straightforward, how the United States is doing in the medals tally.
“If you’re like me,” Bill Speltz, sports editor of the Missoulian in Montana wrote last month in a column about a backstroke hopeful swimming at the U.S. Trials in Omaha, “you don’t think much about the Olympics until they’re right up in your face,” and that’s from a guy who’s in the sports business, so if he doesn’t think much about the Olympics, what does that say about the people he’s writing for?
Dollars to doughnuts, when they’re reading his stuff over a cup of coffee, they want to know how the red, white and blue is doing against the rest of the world — especially the Russians and, increasingly in the 21st century, the Chinese.
Just ask President Biden and his advisers who our main competitors are on this globe. He and they are pretty clear, indeed emphatically direct, about it.
At the end of May, for instance, the White House’s top official for Asia said the United States is entering a period of intense competition with China:
“The period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end,” Kurt Campbell, the U.S. coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council, said at an event hosted by Stanford University. U.S. policy, he added in a story reported by Bloomberg, will now operate under a “new set of strategic parameters,” and “the dominant paradigm is going to be competition.”
Guess where that is going to play out very visibly?
It is an open secret at the USOPC not only that the Chinese are likely to dominate at the Beijing Winter Games, due to open in February 2022, just six months after the close of the Tokyo Olympics, but that the American team may well be looking then at what you might call a not-optimal situation. Take away the skater Nathan Chen, the skiers Mikaela Shiffrin and Jessie Diggins, the snowboarder Chloe Kim and — hmm.
This leads to:
It is well understood at those entities and elsewhere around the American Olympic landscape that the NCAA pipeline, which traditionally has provided the pathway for athletes, American and otherwise, to the Games, is in the midst of change.
The Los Angeles Games are now only seven short years away. It is imperative — repeat, a must — that the U.S. team do well at LA28. Everyone at the USOPC, the national governing body system and, indeed, the IOC understands this. That’s one of the keys to a great Games anywhere, but particularly in the United States, which provides much of the television income that for many years has been the lynchpin to Olympic finance worldwide.
The USOPC, meanwhile, has the unenviable task of trying to balance increasing and very vocal demands for athlete mental health and other services with, on the other hand, medals performance. It gets no money from Congress; as ever since 1978, it is charged with being self-sustaining.
Congress has in recent months created a commission to study USOPC operations and goals. It’s presumably due to get to work in earnest after Tokyo. A laudable result would be if the 16-member panel, which includes some of the USOPC’s most strident critics, can imagine a funding mechanism.
One that actually works in the real world.
Because China is on the move. If it wins the medals count? In, say, Paris? In just three years? It’s totally conceivable.
To reiterate, most Americans only pay attention to the Olympics when the Games are, every few years, back in their face.
And if the critics — understandably, appropriately — have had a lot to say over the past several years, just wait until the American team gets to a Games and, you know, stumbles.