American Women Will Rule the Rio Olympics

[F-22Raptor]

They vault higher, swim faster, punch harder and kick more violently than ever. Their oars slice through water with propeller-like efficiency. They’re also pretty good at soccer, water polo and volleyball, both varieties: beach and gym. On foot they’re crazy fast.

They are the women of the U.S. Olympic team, and they are the main reason The Wall Street Journal is projecting Team USA to win both the gold and overall medal races at the Games of the 31st Olympiad beginning next week in Rio de Janeiro.

For the first time ever, U.S. women in 2012 won more medals than U.S. men, and since then they haven’t looked back. Heading into Rio, their male counterparts are leaning on America’s female Olympians for advice on team building, training techniques, even game strategy.

In rowing, the U.S. women’s eight hasn’t lost a major race in the past decade. Watching them closely is the squad of young U.S. male rowers, who train on the same lake near Princeton, N.J. “The hardest thing to do in sports is to win and then keep winning,” saidrower Seth Weil, who will make his Olympic debut in Rio.

Weil said he and his teammates, many of whom are going through their first Olympic cycle, have seen how the women use what is now an intense competition to make the eight as an advantage in that it raises the intensity of training between the major competitions. “They have built this culture that keeps them winning, and now it’s like a freight train.”

It might be hard to imagine that 10,500 athletes from 206 countries will actually compete for 971 medals over the course of 20 days in Brazil.

That nation has had to prepare for the world’s biggest athletic competition through a deepening recession, a political crisis that has forced its president from office, near-calamitous construction delays and the frightening spread of the mosquito-born Zika virus.

Yet ready or not—the athletes’ village reportedly is not—the Rio Games are set to start. Every country in the world will be gunning for Team USA, which won both medal races four years ago in London with 46 gold medals and 103 overall. The Journal projects the U.S. will win 42 gold medals and more than 100 overall this year (it depends on which Russians are allowed to show up), thumping the rest of the field, including second-place China, which will finish with 34 gold medals and 81 overall, though those totals will rise if Russian weightlifters are banned.

As usual, swimmers and track and field athletes should produce about half of the U.S. medal haul, and gymnast Simone Biles, the world’s best, seems a sure bet to be the Games biggest American star. The U.S. is not alone in excelling at specific Olympic sports. The Chinese will dominate diving, men’s gymnastics, table tennis and badminton. British cyclists and Korean shooters of both arrows and bullets are tough to beat. The Aussies will give the Americans everything they can handle in the pool but struggle out of the water. Russian weightlifters and wrestlers—assuming they can prove they are free of performance-enhancing drugs—should pile up medals. China also excels at weightlifting.

The Journal’s forecasting system is based on past performances and interviews with experts. Rather than simply predicting winners of gold, silver and bronze medals in each event, the Journal assigns a probability of success for each contender and then uses those probabilities to project the most likely outcome.

For instance, swimming sensation Katie Ledecky, owner of the 11 fastest performances in the 800 meter freestyle, has, for all intents and purposes, a 100% chance to win the gold medal in that race. No one on the planet comes within half the pool of her. An aging Michael Phelps has just a 40% chance to defend his title in the 200 meter butterfly over stiff competition from Hungary’s Laszlo Cseh and South Africa’s Chad le Clos.

John Dewan, founder of Baseball Info Solutions, tallies the probabilities and runs 1,000 simulations of the Games for the Journal, to come up with the likeliest outcome. The method has proven very accurate, successfully projecting the U.S. winning both medal races in London, when many experts believed China would solidify the Olympic dominance it established in 2008.

Despite competing in slightly fewer events than men, U.S. women will win more gold medals and more medals overall, the Journal predicts. Also the U.S. women will likely perform as well as or better than the men in team sports such as soccer, volleyball, basketball, gymnastics and water polo. The result: Some 140 U.S. women will leave Rio with medals around their necks, compared with only 90 American men. Kim Rhode, a shooter trying to become the first American to medal in six different Games, will likely be one of them.

Possibly surpassing Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian ever, as the most-watched American swimmer in Rio will be Ledecky, the 19-year-old swimming sensation from Washington, D.C. She is favored to sweep the 200, 400 and 800-meter freestyle races, along with winning a relay medal. Ledecky’s dominance in the 800 is absurd. Her world record time of 8:06.68, set in January, is nearly 12 seconds faster this year than her closest competitor.

“Katie Ledecky is the greatest athlete in the world today, any sport, either gender,” said Gary Hall, Jr. a five-time gold medalist in swimming. “Having the top 11 times in the world in an event is just unheard of.”

Perhaps, this is a fitting development in a year when a woman has gained the presidential nomination of a major political party for the first time. It’s also in keeping with the evolution of American society itself. According to a 2014 study, women are now 17% more likely than men to attend college and 23% more likely to graduate by age 35.

The simplest explanation for the success of Team USA’s top female athletes today is Title IX, the 44-year-old federal law that largely prohibits gender discrimination in any educational programs that receive government funding. That requires schools to offer equal athletic opportunities to both sexes, a requirement that helped spark the proliferation of the youth sports opportunities for girls from the time they are toddlers.

It also means that to offset football’s 85 scholarships, colleges usually offer many more scholarships to women than men in Olympic sports from swimming to volleyball to rowing.

The current generation of women has never known a time when girls weren’t expected to compete as intensely as boys. In few other countries is female participation in sports so deeply woven into the fabric of youth culture.

The idea that male athletes could learn anything from how women train and compete would seem completely foreign in much of the world. Not in the U.S., not even in the boxing ring. Charles Conwell is a 165-pound middleweight from Cleveland, Ohio. He is 19-years-old, and will make his Olympic debut in Rio. His father, Charles, who introduced him to the sport, coaches him, but whenever Claressa Shields, a gold medalist in London, is training in the same gym, Conwell’s attention turns to her. They are both middleweights, and she has what he wants.

“She’s always giving me tips,” Conwell says of Shields, who is just 21-years old and heads to Rio as a heavy favorite. “She tells me to keep my hands up, work my jab, stuff like that.”

In U.S. boxing circles, Shields is known for taking over any gym she’s training in with her outgoing personality. In competition videos, her voice dominates the audio track, as she urges her teammates on, serving all at once as a sort of captain/team mother. She is also the best boxer on the team, the only one heading to Rio as a defending Olympic champion, and the obvious one to emulate.

A similar dynamic is unfolding in water polo. John Mann and the U.S. men’s water polo team got complacent at the World Championships last year in Russia, where they gave up a two-goal, fourth quarter lead to Greece and finished seventh.

Since then, Mann and his teammates have kept a close eye on the U.S. women’s team, which won gold in London and at last year’s world championships. “Any time you have a great team you should watch,” Mann said. The U.S. women, led by former world player of the year Maggie Steffens, plays a remarkably selfless style, Mann said. Few teams, male or female, are better at playing a counter-attacking defense, or covering for one another in transition. “That’s something we’re working hard on.”

The women’s water polo team reports to practice at a military pool in Los Alamitos, Calif. each day at 7 a.m. Three times a week they lift weights from 7:00-8:30, then swim from 8:30-10:30. They take a three-hour break, to eat, nap, and watch match videos, then go back into the pool from 1:30-4:30 for drills and scrimmages.

“What helps is the culture,” Steffens said. “It’s not about getting yourself to the next step. It’s what we can do as a team.”

To be sure, not every sports governing body in the U.S. is using the women’s training methods and strategies as a blueprint for success. The U.S. women’s gymnastics team follows a strict program under the authority of national team coordinator Martha Karolyi that appears to be working very well, though it isn’t a model for the men’s training. Simone Biles enters the Games as the favorite to win the individual all-around gold. She would be the fourth consecutive American woman to do so.

Although the women gymnasts, three of whom are teenagers, are scattered across the country training with personal coaches, they gather every five or six weeks for an intense camp with Karolyi, who controls nearly every waking minute of their days. “Our system is very old school,” said Aly Raisman, who is making her second trip to the Olympics.

The men’s gymnastics team says that because of their age and the intensity of their routines—they are all in their 20s—that sort of authoritarian rule wouldn’t work for them. They may want to try it though. The U.S. women are the defending team champions and a favorite to win again.

The training pipelines for men’s and women’s soccer don’t intersect much either. Maybe they should. The women are the reigning world champions and three-time defending Olympic champs. The U.S. men didn’t qualify for Rio.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/american-women-will-carry-the-torch-1469716307