OLYMPIC SOCCER: OUR TEAM
this little essay on the USWNT from the new yorker came out last week, but i love it so much i don't care. deal!
The U.S. national team-soccer edition, female variety-won Olympic gold yesterday, cementing its status as the most beloved sporting squad around. Does anyone dislike this team? Some outside the fifty states, perhaps, but it’s hard to see how. Celebrating a goal earlier in the tournament, the full team collaborated on a tribute to Gabby Douglas and the American gymnastics team, another beloved group. Celebrating the team’s first goal yesterday, Abby Wambach was having so much fun, running and shouting and shaking her fists to the sky, that she didn’t notice another of her teammates running in her direction, also celebrating wildly. They knocked each other over.
We can be thankful, first, that this team represents us well-better than many of our athletes, and some of our fans, several of whom showed up to yesterday’s match in American flag morphsuits. Midway through the first half, Abby Wambach kicked her opponent in the nose. It was an honest mistake, so she came back to help her up, apologized, and gave her a hug around the waist. It’s this dichotomy that makes the team so lovable: in the same instant, you expect Wambach to kick you in the face, if that’s what it takes to get to the ball, and then to take care of you once she does. Boys love Alex Morgan; women love Megan Rapinoe-everybody loves Abby Wambach.
We also love winners, whoever they are, and we don’t have a more successful team playing in a more competitive sport. Our soccer-playing women are more highly skilled than our men, relative to their competition, and we get to see them play in more consequential matches. We also love this team because they are good, and often great, but hardly dominant. They’re flawed, in other words, and their games are often filled with suspense. No team has been more enjoyable to watch in London, off the court, than our men’s basketball team, but their games have been boring. Victories have come by twenty-seven, twenty-nine, thirty-three, forty-seven, and eighty-three points. (They play in the semifinals this afternoon, against Argentina.) There was a five-point win against Lithuania, but that game hardly mattered. If they’d somehow lost, well, you wouldn’t want to be the team that had to play them next.
The female footballers, however, have a knack for winning in style. In Beijing, Carli Lloyd, who scored both American goals yesterday, netted the winning goal in the ninety-sixth minute of the gold-medal match. Against Brazil, in last year’s World Cup quarterfinals, Wambach tied the match in the final seconds of overtime. (The U.S. won on penalty kicks.) In this year’s Olympic semifinal, the U.S. came back from a goal down on three separate occasions, before again scoring in the last moments of overtime. A generation of young American sports fans, many of them female-though the gender disparity dwindles with each victory-is going to grow up with accelerated heart rates from all the stress, but also with a belief that their team can’t lose. They just like stringing the other girls along.
Thursday was revenge of sorts for the team’s lone moment of recent failure. The Americans lost last year’s World Cup to Japan on penalty kicks. Hope Solo, the goalie, had taken that loss especially hard, and she played like it yesterday: she knocked one ball off the bar, knocked another just wide, and missed on a third that found the bar by itself. By that point it seemed that she was charmed. After one final save, of a long lob tipped into the box, Solo grabbed the ball, dropped it in traffic, then fell to the ground while grasping it again. A teammate helped her up and Solo smiled for the first time all game. Nothing would be slipping past her this time.
The U.S. national team-soccer edition, female variety-won Olympic gold yesterday, cementing its status as the most beloved sporting squad around. Does anyone dislike this team? Some outside the fifty states, perhaps, but it’s hard to see how. Celebrating a goal earlier in the tournament, the full team collaborated on a tribute to Gabby Douglas and the American gymnastics team, another beloved group. Celebrating the team’s first goal yesterday, Abby Wambach was having so much fun, running and shouting and shaking her fists to the sky, that she didn’t notice another of her teammates running in her direction, also celebrating wildly. They knocked each other over.
We can be thankful, first, that this team represents us well-better than many of our athletes, and some of our fans, several of whom showed up to yesterday’s match in American flag morphsuits. Midway through the first half, Abby Wambach kicked her opponent in the nose. It was an honest mistake, so she came back to help her up, apologized, and gave her a hug around the waist. It’s this dichotomy that makes the team so lovable: in the same instant, you expect Wambach to kick you in the face, if that’s what it takes to get to the ball, and then to take care of you once she does. Boys love Alex Morgan; women love Megan Rapinoe-everybody loves Abby Wambach.
We also love winners, whoever they are, and we don’t have a more successful team playing in a more competitive sport. Our soccer-playing women are more highly skilled than our men, relative to their competition, and we get to see them play in more consequential matches. We also love this team because they are good, and often great, but hardly dominant. They’re flawed, in other words, and their games are often filled with suspense. No team has been more enjoyable to watch in London, off the court, than our men’s basketball team, but their games have been boring. Victories have come by twenty-seven, twenty-nine, thirty-three, forty-seven, and eighty-three points. (They play in the semifinals this afternoon, against Argentina.) There was a five-point win against Lithuania, but that game hardly mattered. If they’d somehow lost, well, you wouldn’t want to be the team that had to play them next.
The female footballers, however, have a knack for winning in style. In Beijing, Carli Lloyd, who scored both American goals yesterday, netted the winning goal in the ninety-sixth minute of the gold-medal match. Against Brazil, in last year’s World Cup quarterfinals, Wambach tied the match in the final seconds of overtime. (The U.S. won on penalty kicks.) In this year’s Olympic semifinal, the U.S. came back from a goal down on three separate occasions, before again scoring in the last moments of overtime. A generation of young American sports fans, many of them female-though the gender disparity dwindles with each victory-is going to grow up with accelerated heart rates from all the stress, but also with a belief that their team can’t lose. They just like stringing the other girls along.
Thursday was revenge of sorts for the team’s lone moment of recent failure. The Americans lost last year’s World Cup to Japan on penalty kicks. Hope Solo, the goalie, had taken that loss especially hard, and she played like it yesterday: she knocked one ball off the bar, knocked another just wide, and missed on a third that found the bar by itself. By that point it seemed that she was charmed. After one final save, of a long lob tipped into the box, Solo grabbed the ball, dropped it in traffic, then fell to the ground while grasping it again. A teammate helped her up and Solo smiled for the first time all game. Nothing would be slipping past her this time.