TeamUSATracker: June 21, 2023
Men's Epee Team Black Card puts Paris in Doubt, Ups & Downs for US Qualifying, and IN DEPTH: why 3x3 Basketball Rankings do not make any sense
401 Days until Paris….
Top Picks Coming Up📺:
Tonight begins Men’s World Lacrosse Championships in San Diego. USA vs Canada (7 pm ET on ESPN2 to start things off, ESPN Plus/ESPN2/ESPNU)
1 Day until Women’s PGA Championships in Springfield, New Jersey (Peacock, Golf Channel, NBC)
6 Days until USA Swimming International Trials (Peacock, NBC)
10 Days until Tour de France (Peacock, USA Network)
15 Days until USA Track and Field Outdoor Championships. -Trials for Worlds (Peacock, NBC)
29 Days until FIFA Women’s World Cup (USWNT roster announced today )(Fox, FS1)
Men’s Epee Team Likely will not qualify for Paris
We are disappointed by Curtis's actions and regret that they have harmed Team USA's chances of fielding a men's epee team for the 2024 Olympics. Following a hearing, Curtis has been formally removed from the Pan-American Championships team pending potential further review after the tournament. He will not be eligible to fence at the 2023 Fencing World Championships in Milan, Italy
Team 🇺🇸 Fencing won 16 medals (9 🥇3🥈4🥉)at the Pan American Championships including 4 team events (men's Foil, men's and women's sabre, women's epee). They swept the individual podiums of men’s and women’s foil as both teams are medal contenders for Paris as they are ranked in the top 3 in the world.
In terms of Paris Olympics - the big story for Team USA was the zero qualifying points given to Team 🇺🇸 men’s epee team after Curtis McDowald kicked and damaged a freestanding banner (seen in the Youtube video above at 7 minutes and 13 seconds) post Team USA’s semifinal loss to Colombia. The actions by McDowald resulted in a black card for Team USA’s men’s epee and zero points given to Team USA in terms of qualification for Paris 2024 (Team USA was in line for 36 to 40 points).
Men’s team epee was not expected to win a medal at the Paris Olympics and qualification might have been difficult as Team USA was trailing Venezuela for the Americas region spot but this disqualification means 🇺🇸 Fencing men’s team epee will likely not qualify for the Olympics for the third time in the last five Olympics.
⬆️AND ⬇️ RESULTS FOR #TEAMUSA🇺🇸TOWARDS PARIS
Wheelchair Basketball:
⬆️Steve Serio, Men’s Wheelchair Basketball Wins 🥇, Women’s Wheelchair Basketball 🥉
Steve Serio and Brian Bell led Team 🇺🇸 men’s wheelchair basketball team to 🥇 at the IWBF World Championships. It was Serio and Bell’s first ever World Championships 🥇 medal and adds to their two 🥇medals from Rio and Tokyo. Steve Serio now has a combined 9 medals from Paralympics and World Championships (3 of every color). Team 🇺🇸 women’s wheelchair basketball team won 🥉 over Germany for their first medal since 2010 IWBF World Championships. Both teams qualified a Paralympics qualifying spot for the Americas at the Parapan Games in November.
Canoe/Kayak
⬆️Zach “Bug” Lokken
1st ever World Cup medal for Zachary “Bug” Lokken in the C1 canoe slalom in Tacen, Slovenia. Full writeup from Lokken’s home town paper and Bugzathug instagram post here. This was the first World Cup medal for Team 🇺🇸in C1 since Evy Leibfarth won 2nd in Tacen in 2022. As Lokken mentioned in his Insta post-the 2023 World Championships is key for Team USA to qualify C1 and K1 spots later this summer.
Tennis:
⬆️Frances Tiafoe
Tiafoe entered the Top 10 for the 1st time ever after winning the BOSS Open in Stuggart, Germany. Tiafoe’s Instagram post on his title and entering the Top 10 is a must read and Tiafoe’s 3rd ATP title (1st title on grass) put two 🇺🇸men in the Top 10 for the first time since 2012.
⬆️Austin Krajicek
Krajick won the French Open doubles with partner Ivan Dodig and the win launched Krajicek to #1 men’s doubles player in the world (Krajicek is the 20th 🇺🇸 man to have that distinction). Krajicek finished 4th in Tokyo with partner Tennys Sandgren and it will be interesting who Krajicek will partner with in Paris as Krajicek will likely be a medal contender in Paris as he has made B2B French Open Doubles finals. Many top 🇺🇸 male players might skip Paris to play in the Citi Open (ATP 500 tournament and a key warmup for the US Open) since many male 🇺🇸 players are much better on hard court than clay.
⬇️This stat per Nick Zaccardi for US tennis- The U.S. has now gone 12 consecutive majors without a singles champion for the first time in history (dating to 1877)". The last longest streak in US history they broke at Wimbledon but could be tough this year’s with Djokovic’s dominance (last 4 Wimbledon titles) but Fritz and Tiafoe are both now in the Top 10. The women’s singles draw is likely the better opportunity since the last 5 women’s Wimbledon winners have all been first time Wimbledon winners so that stat could bode well for 🇺🇸 women who have 16 women in main draw and many looking to make their first Wimbledon QF like Jessica Pegula and Coco Gauff.
Surfing:
⬆️Griffin Colapinto and Carissa Moore/Caroline Marks- Colapinto and Moore both hold the yellow jersey (#1 in the standings) after winning WSL title at Surf Ranch Pro and making the semifinals at the Surf City El Salvador. Colapinto has secured a career high in WSL points and is very close to mathematically securing a Top 8 finish and Olympic qualification. The 🇺🇸women have won 5 of the first 7 events on the WSL tour in 2023 after Caroline Marks’ WSL title at Surf City El Salvador. Tokyo Gold medalist Carissa Moore won 3 of the first 7 stops on the WSL tour before being defeated by Marks in the SF in El Salvador and remains a medal contender for the Paris Olympics. The final stop of the WSL season will be at Teahupo’o in Tahiti (site of the 2024 Olympics) so will be interesting to watch how the 🇺🇸 surf team does in Tahiti as a precursor to 2024.
⬇️ 51 year old Kelly Slater the only male American surfer with a win at Teahupo’o in Tahiti (5 WSL Championship Tour wins at locaion ) needs to win last 3 events or hope the USA can secure an extra berth via ISA World Surfing Games 2024 to make the US Surfing Olympic team for Paris 2024. As of now it looks like Colapinto and Tokyo Olympian John John Florence will represent Team USA in Tahiti as fellow Tokyo Olympian Kolohe Andino did not survive the WSL mid-season cut and likely will not be headed back to the Olympics.
Golf:
⬆️Rose Zhang is in action at the Women’s PGA Championship starting Thursday. Zhang won her first tournament as a pro to move up to #61 in the rankings. In terms of Paris 2024 -Zhang’s emergence on the LPGA Tour can only help Team USA get four spots for Paris Olympics. As of latest rankings, no country has four female golfers in the top 15 of the Rolex Rankings (US has only three). Besides Zhang -🇺🇸women have 16 golfers in the Top 50 (and half of them are 26 years old and younger) so there is still a chance that Team USA will get 4 spots especially with a major victory by 🇺🇸 woman.
⬆️Wyndham Clark and Brooks Koepka
After winning the US Open Wyndham Clark moves up to #2 for Team 🇺🇸in the current Olympic Ranking OWGR Prediction by @VC606
The current US Golf Team would be World #1 Scott Scheffler, US Open Champ Wydham Clark, PGA Championship Brooks Koepka, and defending gold medalist from Tokyo Xander Schauffele. For Koepka, the PGA-LIV merger may give Koepka additional opportunities besides the majors to qualify in the Top 4 for Paris 2024.
🔎IN FOCUS: Olympic Qualification via Rankings
Why 3x3 Basketball Rankings Do Not Work
As of Monday June 12- tennis rankings count for the 56 athletes who can gain direct acceptance into Paris 2024. Tennis is one of nearly twenty sports that use rankings for Olympic qualification and tennis is the technically the last sport to start the clock on the rankings that will be used for Paris. While there is no IOC version of the College Football Playoff committee for these twenty sports that use rankings…some maybe should use a committee.
A refresher on what sports qualify by ranking, by event (World Championships or Pan Am Games), or by result (athletics or swimming)
Most sports use these 4 techniques to create rankings
✅The most ranking points go to winner of the event and the rest of the rankings points for that event are given out in descending order
✅ Sports weight the bigger events. Ranking points for an individual are usually higher in a bigger event such as grand slam in tennis or the World Championships in judo and taekwondo. Cycling just changed their rankings this year to give the Grand Tours like Tour de France more ranking points after years of criticism that single day races counted too much in the rankings (road cycling’s rankings are still far from perfect). Some sports like golf will factor a strength of the field like snowboarding does and that can be effective to see how an impressive a win might have been by an individual versus other individuals .
✅ Cap the amount of events that count for rankings. All different ways to do this simplest -have a maximum events able to be counted (tennis, beach volleyball, and golf) or only make only make certain events count for Olympics qualification (skateboarding, weightlifting)
✅Length. Every sport has a different amount of time counted towards the Olympics some sports have one year or one season (tennis, road cycling, surfing, rugby sevens), other sports having multiple seasons and priority on more recent results (golf, indoor volleyball)
And most of the 21 sport disciplines that use rankings as a factor in the Olympics
✅Use TEAM results to determine TEAM rankings (beach volleyball, fencing, rugby sevens, table tennis, triathlon, volleyball)
✅Or INDIVIDUAL results to determine if an INDIVIDUAL athlete qualifies or their nation gets one spot at the Olympics (athletics, fencing, gymnastics, golf, judo, modern pentathlon, skateboarding, surfing, table tennis, takewondo, tennis, triathlon, volleyball) ….
BUT THEN THERE IS 3x3 BASKETBALL
❌Rankings for a TEAM (NATION)to qualify are based on INDIVIDUAL rankings….
🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
Imagine if tennis didn’t give direct acceptance to the Paris Olympics to back to back French Open runner-up Casper Ruud because Norway doesn’t have three tennis players inside the top 1,000 (they don’t- Andreja Petrovic is ranked #1280 ) but thats is what 3x3 basketball.
Most fan saw that Team 🇺🇸 3x3 women’s basketball team won gold🥇 and the Team 🇺🇸 3x3 men’s basketball team won silver🥈 at the 3x3 World Cup (the biggest team event for 3x3 basketball outside of the Olympics)….so fans assumed Team 🇺🇸 3x3 Basketball would be set for qualification for Paris 2024
NOT SO FAST!!!🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
Both 🇺🇸 teams had only one loss the entire tournament and 13-2 combined record that certainly should factor in Team USA being Top 3 in the world to qualify for Paris Summer Olympics in 3x3 Basketball.
NOT SO FAST!!!🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
For the men’s team - the win at the World Championships gave Kareem Maddox less points than a QF pro stop in 2022. A QF pro stop where Maddox’s team had to win 1 game to get into the quarterfinals not the 4 games Team USA had to win at the World Championships.
And even though FIBA 3x3 has continental events and World Championships that could be used for a team ranking by nation - FIBA created a nation ranking by the top 24 players for that nation who play FIBA 3x3. That would be 6 teams for each nation - spoiler alert -nations do not get to enter 6 teams in a continental event, world Championships or an Olympic event.
🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯…AND WAIT IT GETS BETTER some of the BEST PLAYERS don’t count for TEAM USA rankings
For the women’s 3x3 team - college stars Hailey Van Lith and Cameron Brink played for Team USA but neither of their results count right now for Team USA because they are not in the top 24 players for Team USA. The MVP for the USA men’s 3x3 team former BYU great and NBA lottery pick Jimmer Fredette also does not count as well. All three plan to play for USA Basketball 3x3 this summer to move up their rankings but still the points don’t make sense. For instance Fredette actually earned more points for helping TeamUSA win the Americup finals over Brazil then winning World Cup silver medal at the World Cup. As far I know 3x3 Basketball is the only Olympic sport that ranks a continental qualifier equal to a World Championships.
USING APPLES TO RANK ORANGES….
Even though the ranking system for 3x3 basketball rankings is the worst I have ever seen for any Olympic sport - even the revamped road cycling rankings likely need some tweaks to help qualification for the Olympics because using apples to rank oranges.
As mentioned above UCI decided to revamp their rankings to make the Grand Tours (Tour de France, Giro'd' Italia, La Vuelta a España) count more. Sepp Kuss is one of the best American cyclists (won a Tour de France stage in 2021) and a key domestique to Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard. Kuss’ main goal of the Tour de France is to do what Jumbo Visma tells Kuss to do and spoiler alert - that will be to make sure Jonas Vingegaard wins the Tour de France again. Jumbo Visma DOES NOT care about qualifying USA Cycling qualifying four sports for the Olympics because cycling is a team sport and Jumbo Visma cares about Jumbo Visma winning. This would be like if FIFA said Norway could qualify for the World Cup because of Erling Haaland’s play in the premier league.
The other problem with the road cycling ranking is their weighting of events on their pro schedule . A 20th place finish for Sepp Kuss at the Tour de France would be equal to an 8th place finish or higher at the ProSeries stop at the Maryland Cycling Classic (level below UCI World Tour equivalent to challenger level in tennis). It doesn’t make sense why cycling would not give Kuss a lot more points for completing the 21 stages at Tour de France on the highest level of cycling than a one day road race in Maryland on a lower level.
The simple fix for road cycling would be to count World Championships (from 2022 and 2023-only 2023 counts now) and an additional six ProSeries tour or World tour one day races that count specifically for Olympic qualification. Like soccer - road cycling could create an international window avoiding the grand tours, monument races and other important stage races for pro road cycling teams and elevate one day stage races around the globe for Olympic qualification.