Caitlin Clark, the most well-liked ladies’s basketball participant within the nation, if not the world, has been left off the 2024 U.S. Olympic ladies’s basketball roster, three folks with data of the scenario advised USA TODAY Sports activities Saturday morning.
This confirms USA TODAY Sports activities’ in a single day reporting that Clark — whose thrilling brand 3’s and pinpoint passes have electrified document crowds and TV audiences whereas incomes her WNBA rookie of the month honors and quite a few rookie statistical information — has been snubbed by USA Basketball.
USA Basketball, the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee and Clark couldn’t instantly be reached for remark Saturday morning.
Two different sources, each long-time U.S. basketball veterans with a long time of expertise within the ladies’s recreation, advised USA TODAY Sports activities Friday that concern over how Clark’s thousands and thousands of followers would react to what would seemingly be restricted enjoying time on a stacked roster was an element within the choice making. If true, that will be a unprecedented admission of the strain that this multi-million-dollar sensation, who indicators autographs for dozens of kids earlier than and after each recreation, has brought about for the previous guard of ladies’s basketball. The 2 folks spoke on situation of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
The U.S. ladies’s Olympic basketball staff is probably the most dominant and profitable staff on the planet, having final misplaced a recreation in 1992. However for all of their victories and medals, the U.S. gamers are sometimes largely ignored by the sports activities media on the Olympic Video games. The gymnasts and swimmers and runners and naturally the U.S. ladies’s soccer staff get a lot extra consideration. It’s a crowded couple of weeks with dozens of medals being handed out day-after-day, so the competitors for headlines is all the time intense.
Even on the ladies’s gold-medal basketball video games on the Olympics, the press tribune is sort of all the time half-empty, if not worse. Clark in fact would have modified all that, igniting curiosity not simply amongst U.S. media however reporters around the globe.
Clark, 22, has turn out to be the human gateway to ladies’s hoops for a whole lot of hundreds, seemingly even thousands and thousands, of women and boys, men and women. USA Basketball actually might have tapped into her huge attain to assist promote not solely its 2024 Olympic staff however the ladies’s recreation usually. Choosing Clark additionally would have honored the recognition of the faculty recreation — and it has been completed earlier than, with collegians like Christian Laettner, Rebecca Lobo, Diana Taurasi and Breanna Stewart making U.S. Olympic groups through the years.
The timing of USA Basketball’s choice couldn’t have been worse. Clark made a WNBA rookie record-tying seven 3’s and scored 30 factors in entrance of the most important WNBA crowd in 17 years: 20,333, Friday night time in Washington, D.C. Coming into the sport, gained by Clark’s Indiana Fever, the Fever and Mystics have been a mixed 2-19. Tons of of kids and adults within the crowd wore Clark’s No. 22 jerseys.
The viewers at Capital One Enviornment was greater than double the group the Chicago Sky drew the night time earlier than in the identical constructing.
For months, Clark’s doable choice has been the subject of hypothesis all through the basketball world.
“I don’t know the way you permit the nation with out her,” four-time Olympic gold medalist Lisa Leslie advised The Sporting Information in April, including that Clark “100%” must be on Workforce USA.
