On Tuesday, one country at the Olympics had a particularly good day.
Its women’s gymnasts won the team event in a rout. The women’s rugby team took an unexpected bronze medal and went viral. The swimmers won four of a possible five medals in two individual races and a relay.
Several of the country’s rowers got through their heats and remained in medal contention. Several of the team’s tennis players won their matches, and the BMX freestylers strutted their stuff in qualifiers. The men’s volleyball team remained unbeaten, the men’s water polo team got a bounce-back win, and the men’s soccer team stormed into the knockout rounds. The country isn’t known for table tennis, but its players improved their record in Paris to 5-1.
For most countries, that’s a great day.
At the Olympics though, the US is not most countries.
US fans aren’t used to looking up at South Korea, France, Australia, China and Japan in the medal table. Though 3×3 basketball is a relatively new Olympic sport, they’re not used to seeing the women and men lose on the same day to Germany and Serbia, respectively. And they’re a little puzzled to see a men’s surfing competition in which no US men are into the quarter-finals.
On one hand, the medal count that showed the USA in sixth place at noon Paris time on Wednesday (the sheer number of events means positions may have changed slightly by the time you read this) is the version that sorts the table by gold medals. But, as is the custom in the US, the table is sorted by total medals, the Americans were top by a wide margin, with 26 medals to France’s 18 and China’s 14, at the start of Wednesday’s events.
Out of the 206 Olympic teams in the Games, maybe 200 of them will celebrate any medal as a massive achievement. It’s mostly in the United States in which the reaction to a silver or bronze medal is often, “oh, that’s too bad.” And the debate over whether to sort the medal table by gold medals or total medals is a hot topic in much of the world on social media, though most US residents and fans simply shrug.
(To be completely pedantic, the best way to gauge overall strength would be a sliding scale with five points per gold, three per silver and one per bronze. Through Day 4, the USA led with 64 points to France’s 56, China’s 50, Japan’s 45, Australia’s 43 and Great Britain’s 38. Or someone can rank countries by the top eight in each event – in fact, veteran Olympic sports journalist Rich Perelman does that now.)
For the most part, USA’s results aren’t a surprise. Multiple projections before the Olympics had the Americans far ahead in total medals but in a close race in gold medals, with China most likely to be out in front early thanks to diving and shooting. Track and field, where Team USA usually dominated, starts around the halfway point of the Games.
Yes, the US swimmers seem unlikely to repeat their performance from Tokyo, when they claimed 11 gold medals. But they’re only a couple of gold medals behind the most reasonable projections. No one should be surprised that Summer McIntosh, Léon Marchand and Ariarne Titmus are winning gold medals that the USA had claimed in past years.
So far, no US athletes have missed out on gold medals in events they were clearly favored to win. Ryan Murphy was one of the favorites in the 100m backstroke, having won in Rio eight years ago, but his bronze medal wasn’t a shock. Carson Foster had good credentials in the men’s 400m individual medley, but no one was beating Marchand in that final. Even the mighty Katie Ledecky wasn’t the favorite in the women’s 400m freestyle.
The gold medals Team USA have won, aside from women’s team gymnastics, were mild to moderate surprises. The US men’s 4×100m freestyle relay improved from bronze at last year’s world championships to gold this year. Last year, Torri Huske and Gretchen Walsh were third and eighth in the women’s 100m butterfly; this year, they took gold and silver. Lee Kiefer was the defending champion in women’s foil fencing, but only two fencers in Olympic history had pulled off back-to-back gold medals in the event. Yet, she delivered.
Among the USA’s 26 medals through Tuesday, many may not have been shocks but were far from certain. Kassidy Cook and Sarah Bacon in synchronized diving. Haley Batten in mountain biking. The men’s gymnastics team. The women’s rugby sevens team. Lauren Scruggs, the runner-up to Kiefer in fencing.
Other athletes lived up to lofty expectations. Jagger Eaton and Nyjah Huston in men’s street skateboarding. Chloé Dygert in the crash-filled women’s cycling time trial. In swimming, despite taking “only” two gold medals, the US team has 15 medals – more than every country’s entire Olympic contingents through day four aside from the hosts, France.
None of this is to suggest that US fans should be overjoyed by overachievement across the board. Whatever boxing judges are looking for, the US men aren’t delivering. US shooters are having a down year. Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula bowed out of women’s tennis singles far too soon, though they’ve teamed up on one of the five US doubles teams that have posted a combined 6-0 record so far. The heralded, experienced 3×3 basketball teams looked befuddled in their debuts Tuesday. Everyone in the USA is suddenly a surfing expert, dissecting why John John Florence and Griffin Colapinto are out.
But we’re still not looking at enough data to suggest that the USA will fall far short of expectations in Paris – if there are widespread US failures in track and field and in teams sports like basketball then maybe we need to reassess. And most countries would be celebrating both the continued achievement of their veterans (Ledecky, Murphy, Eaton) along with a lot of newly emerging Olympic stars – Batten, Scruggs, Cook and Bacon, Stephen Nedoroscik, Fred Richard, Alex Sedrick, Taryn Kloth and Kristen Nuss. In most countries, the rest of the world wouldn’t be eagerly waiting for them to “fail” by taking “only” a silver or bronze.
But, in the Olympics, the US is not most countries.
