Olympic Team Quotes

Ove glares out of the window. The poser is jogging. Not that Ove is provoked by jogging. Not at all. Ove couldn’t give a damn about people jogging. What he can’t understand is why they have to make such a big thing of it. With those smug smiles on their faces, as if they were out there curing pulmonary emphysema. Either they walk fast or they run slowly, that’s what joggers do. It’s a forty-year-old man’s way of telling the world that he can’t do anything right. Is it really necessary to dress up as a fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast in order to be able to do it? Or the Olympic tobogganing team? Just because one shuffles aimlessly around the block for three quarters of an hour?

Someone who doesn't make the (Olympic) team might weep and collapse. In my day no one fell on the track and cried like a baby. We lost gracefully. And when someone won, he didn't act like he'd just become king of the world, either. Athletes in my day were simply humble in our victory. I believe we were more mature then...Maybe it's because the media puts so much pressure on athletes; maybe it's also the money. In my day we competed for the love of the sport...In my day we patted the guy who beat us on the back, wished him well, and that was it.

When you get rid of the estate tax,” he (Warren Buffet) said, “you’re basically handing over command of the country’s resources to people who didn’t earn it. It’s like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the children of all the winners at the 2000 Games.

No matter how much long-distance running might suit me, of course there are days when I feel kind of lethargic and don’t want to run. Actually, it happens a lot. On days like that, I try to think of all kinds of plausible excuses to slough it off. Once, I interviewed the Olympic running Toshihiko Seko, just after he retired from running and became manager of the S&B company team. I asked him, “Does a runner at your level ever feel like you’d rather not run today, like you don’t want to run and would rather just sleep in?” He stared at me and then, in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, “Of course. All the time!

Pete urged Louie to enter the Compton Open and try his legs at a longer distance. “If you stay with Norman Bright,” he told Louie, “you make the Olympic team.

Parents love bathtime because it means that bedtime is near. To prepare your darling for her bath, put on your full-length poncho, because toddlers don’t bathe, they splash, motherfucker. When toddlers bathe, they act like they’re a junior member of the summer Olympics diving team. Get ready. By the time you’re done, your bathroom floor will have a few inches of standing water. The good news is that wiping up all that water counts as mopping the floor.

You may have a silver medal, but I was the top scorer on my second grade team.

By the way, I didn’t win the 5000-meter race at the Olympics, but making the team and not winning is like going to the moon and stumbling over a rock and falling. So what? You’re still on the moon.

My mom believed that you make your own luck. Over the stove she had hung these old, maroon painted letters that spell out, “MANIFEST.” The idea being if you thought and dreamed about the way you wanted your life to be -- if you just envisioned it long enough, it would come into being. But as hard as I had manifested Astrid Heyman with her hand in mine, her blue eyes gazing into mine, her lips whispering something wild and funny and outrageous in my ear, she had remained totally unaware of my existence. Truly, to even dream of dreaming about Astrid, for a guy like me, in my relatively low position on the social ladder of Cheyenne Mountain High, was idiotic. And with her a senior and me a junior? Forget it. Astrid was just lit up with beauty: shining blonde ringlets, June sky blue eyes, slightly furrowed brow, always biting back a smile, champion diver on the swim team. Olympic level. Hell, Astrid was Olympic level in every possible way.

When my son speaks of playing sports, I've always told him: playing on the team is great, but aspire to be the guy who owns the team. I've always told my son: most of the guys on the team will end up bankrupt with bum knees, but not the guy who owns that franchise.

Gentlemen, you don't have enough talent to win on talent alone.

Morgan won her first Olympic medal, a gold, with the American team. The team beat Japan, 2–1, in a match watched by nearly 80,300 people—the largest soccer crowd in Olympic history.

He points out that Washington’s crew typically has the highest GPA of any athletic team on campus, and that that’s no accident. They will be expected to perform in the classroom as well as in the boats.

Are you absolutely sure you want to do this? Seems like maybe it would make more sense to call in a SWAT team or Special Forces.” “That won’t work, isn’t Special Forces where everyone gets a hug?” Charlie called. “That’s the Special Olympics,” Rivera said over his shoulder.

But the greatest paradox of the sport has to do with the psychological makeup of the people who pull the oars. Great oarsmen and oarswomen are necessarily made of conflicting stuff—of oil and water, fire and earth. On the one hand, they must possess enormous self-confidence, strong egos, and titanic willpower. They must be almost immune to frustration. Nobody who does not believe deeply in himself or herself—in his or her ability to endure hardship and to prevail over adversity—is likely even to attempt something as audacious as competitive rowing at the highest levels. The sport offers so many opportunities for suffering and so few opportunities for glory that only the most tenaciously self-reliant and self-motivated are likely to succeed at it. And yet, at the same time—and this is key—no other sport demands and rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars. The team effort—the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat, and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes—is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.

Would you tell a USA Olympic Team hopeful that did not qualify for The Games, to give up and try another sport? No. You would tell them to work harder. Train harder. Try again at the next Olympics. However, that is not what we hear in life. When did it become okay to tell people to quit trying and give up? When did it become okay to promote hopelessness? If we all believe that hard work will not pay off, that we cannot try again, that we should give up early... well then... imagine all he great things that will never happen. I believe in hard work. I believe in dreams. I believe that you can fall and still get up. And no one can take that away from me.

Let me explain: Like two great athletes who don’t play on the same team but meet up on the world stage, blacks and women have always convened at the Oppressed Olympics and given each other a friendly head nod, similar to how when I’m in line at the grocery store and I notice the person in the next checkout line is also buying lemonade.

The most enduring heroes are people who don't try to be.

Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars. The team effort—the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat, and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes—is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.

In December 1935, Louie graduated from high school; a few weeks later, he rang in 1936 with his thoughts full of Berlin. The Olympic trials track finals would be held in New York in July, and the Olympic committee would base its selection of competitors on a series of qualifying races. Louie had seven months to run himself onto the team. In the meantime, he also had to figure out what to do about the numerous college scholarships being offered to him. Pete had won a scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he had become one of the nation’s top ten college milers. He urged Louie to accept USC’s offer but delay entry until the fall, so he could train full-time. So Louie moved into Pete’s frat house and, with Pete coaching him, trained obsessively. All day, every day, he lived and breathed the 1,500 meters and Berlin.

We try to apply the Keeper Test to everyone, including ourselves. Would the company be better off with someone else in my role? The goal is to remove any shame for anyone let go from Netflix. Think of an Olympic team sport like hockey. To get cut from the team is very disappointing, but the person is admired for having had the guts and skill to make the squad in the first place. When someone is let go at Netflix, we hope for the same. We all stay friends and there is no shame.

What if you wake up hung-over the following morning, not dead, but realizing that you had killed somebody? Even worse, what if you wake up in the morning realizing you destroyed the things you loved most in your life? When she regained consciousness in the hospital scared and alone, Kate realized the nightmare was a reality… her parents were dead… her soul-mate was in prison… her life would never be the same. Through the eyes of many, Troy Trindle had it all… he was good-looking, popular, captain of the football team and dating the head cheerleader. What he lacked were the basic necessities; food, shelter and a family. Kate and Troy’s worlds collide when she moves to Alabama to resume training for a spot on the Olympic Gymnastics Team.

The revelation that one could find free food just sitting on a stump in the woods landed on Joe like a thunderbolt. That night he lay in his bunk in the schoolhouse, staring into the dark rafters above, thinking. There seemed to be more than a schoolroom science lesson in the discovery of fungus. If you simply kept your eyes open, it seemed, you just might find something valuable in the most unlikely of places. The trick was to recognize a good thing when you saw it, no matter how odd or worthless it might at first appear, no matter who else might just walk away and leave it behind.

GE’s lab is like a mini United Nations. Every engineering team looks like one of those multiethnic Benetton ads. But this was not affirmative action at work; it was a brutal meritocracy. When you are competing in the global technology Olympics every day, you have to recruit the best talent from anywhere you can find it.

The poser is jogging. Not that Ove is provoked by jogging. Not at all. Ove couldn’t give a damn about people jogging. What he can’t understand is why they have to make such a big thing of it. With those smug smiles on their faces, as if they were out there curing pulmonary emphysema. Either they walk fast or they run slowly, that’s what joggers do. It’s a forty-year-old man’s way of telling the world that he can’t do anything right. Is it really necessary to dress up as a fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast in order to be able to do it? Or the Olympic tobogganing team? Just because one shuffles aimlessly around the block for three quarters of an hour?

The men were famous once. Some of them still are. They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and Brooks had brought them together, 24 summers before. He had picked them and provoked them and pushed them, sometimes irritating them and often infuriating them by his hardness and his aloofness, his scathing rebukes and his unrelenting mind games.

Goucher *never* eats lunch. If he is hungry, he will have a granola bar or another light snack. The guys, especially Reese, kid him that he does not eat enough. He used to eat more. Standing 5'9" to 5'10", he weighs in at just under 140 pounds. At the Olympic Trials in Atlanta in 1996, he weighed 145. After the 5000-meter final, where he finished a disappointing fourteenth, Wetmore told him he was fat. Goucher was livid. When he calmed down he realized Wetmore was right, and he made a conscious effort to lose any excess weight since then. He feels the difference. "My chest was bigger, my arms were bigger. Losing the five pounds has helped me thin out, and it's cut me more. It's made a big difference.

That was not all. When the Jamaican government wanted to buy the country’s oil refinery from an Exxon subsidiary, Marc Rich + Co lent it the money. The trading company even helped to fund Jamaica’s team at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and paid for it to send a bobsled team to participate in the 1988 Winter Olympics – whose unlikely journey to the Games was chronicled in the Disney film Cool Runnings.15

Pooled interdependence is least demanding. That’s when organizations combine, or “roll up,” the separate and independent efforts of people or parts. They have little need—or it is impossible—for them to communicate or collaborate. Think of the team gymnastics competition at the Olympics. Teammates give one another advice and support. But team performance is based solely on adding up individual scores on the floor exercise, parallel bars, and such.

Standing there watching them, it occurred to me that when Hitler watched Joe and the boys fight their way back from the rear of the field to sweep ahead of Italy and Germany seventy-five years ago, he saw, but did not recognize heralds of his doom. He could not have known that one day hundreds of thousands of boys just like them, boys who shared their essential natures--decent and unassuming, not privileged or favored by anything in particular, just loyal, committed, and perseverant--would return to Germany dressed in olive drab, hunting him down. "They are almost all gone now--the legions of young men who saved the world in the years just before I was born. But that afternoon, standing on the balcony of Haus West, I was swept with gratitude for their goodness and their grace, their humility and their honor, their simple civility and all the things they taught us before they flitted across the evening water and finally vanished into the night.

Hockey is a club that holds its members tightly, the bond forged by shared hardship and mutual passion, by every trip to the pond, where your feet hurt and your face is cold and you might get a stick in the ribs or a puck in the mouth, and you still can’t wait to get back out there because you are smitten with the sound of blades scraping against ice and pucks clacking off sticks, and with the game’s speed and ever-changing geometry. It has a way of becoming the center of your life even when you’re not on the ice.

Since Rose, he’d never wanted to be the right guy for anyone. He hadn’t wanted to carry that extra burden. He liked things nice and simple. But things sure as hell weren’t simple with Lena. They’d never been simple with Lena. Things with Lena had been one hundred shades of unadulterated complication from day one. That fact alone should have sent him running in the opposite direction with all the speed of an Olympic gold medalist. But no, here he stood. Holding on to her as if his life depended on it. Heaven help him, his life probably did depend on it.

Brooks wanted to abandon the traditional, linear, dump-and-chase style of hockey that had held sway in North America forever. He wanted to attack the vaunted Russians with their own game, skating with them and weaving with them, stride for high-flying stride. He wanted to play physical, un-yielding hockey to be sure, but he also wanted fast, skilled players who would flourish on the Olympic ice sheet (which is 15 feet wider than NHL rinks) and be able to move and keep possession of the puck and be in such phenomenal condition that they would be the fresher team at the end.

The other boys came up to me and complained, “Lopepe, you never pass the ball to your teammates.” I did not listen. After all, the point of soccer is to score more goals than the other team, not to pass the ball. I kept playing the way I always had. Eventually the other boys had enough. One day I walked out on the soccer field and one of the older boys who ran the games told me, “From now on you are the goalkeeper.” At first I hated being the goalkeeper. You cannot score from the back side of the field, and I love scoring goals. But what could I do? Instead of sulking, I told myself, Okay, you are now the goalkeeper. Make yourself the best goalkeeper in all of Kenya. And I did.

Within Room 40 itself, however, management of day-to-day operations fell largely, if informally, to Cdr. Herbert Hope, recruited in November 1914 to bring naval expertise to the interpretation of intercepted messages. His savvy was badly needed, for the group’s staff were not navy officers but civilians recruited for their skill at mathematics and German and whatever else it was that made a man good at breaking codes and ciphers. The roster came to include a pianist, a furniture expert, a parson from northern Ireland, a wealthy London financier, a past member of the Scottish Olympic hockey team, and a dapper operative named C. Somers Cocks, who, according to one early member, William F. Clarke, was “chiefly remarkable for his spats.

There in bed, happiness comes over me. Not like something that belongs to me, but like a wheel of fire rolling through the room and the world. For a moment I think I’ll manage to let it pass and be able to lie there, aware of what I have, and not wish for anything more. The next moment I want to hang on. I want it to continue. He has to lie beside me tomorrow, too. This is my chance. My only, my last chance. I swing my legs onto the floor. Now I’m panic-stricken. This is what I’ve been working to avoid for thirty-seven years. I’ve systematically practiced the only thing in the world that is worth learning. How to renounce. I’ve stopped hoping for anything. When experienced humility becomes an Olympic discipline, I’ll be on the national team. I’ve never had any patience for other people’s unhappy love affairs. I hate their weakness.

When I first started to run the Jingu Gaien course, Toshihiko Seko was still an active runner and he used this course too. The S&B team used this course every day for training, and over time we naturally grew to know each other by sight. Back then I used to jog there before seven a.m. — when the traffic wasn’t bad, there weren’t as many pedestrians, and the air was relatively clean—and the S&B team members and I would often pass each other and nod a greeting. On rainy days we’d exchange a smile, a guess-we’re-both-havingit-tough kind of smile. I remember two young runners in particular, Taniguchi and Kanei. They were both in their late twenties, both former members of the Waseda University track team, where they’d been standouts in the Hakone relay race. After Seko was named manager of the S&B team, they were expected to be the two young stars of the team. They were the caliber of runner expected to win medals at the Olympics someday, and hard training didn’t faze them. Sadly, though, they were killed in a car accident when the team was training together in Hokkaido in the summer. I’d seen with my own eyes the tough regimen they’d put themselves through, and it was a real shock when I heard the news of their deaths. It hurt me to hear this, and I felt it was a terrible waste. Even now, when I run along Jingu Gaien or Asakasa Gosho, sometimes I remember these other runners. I’ll round a corner and feel like I should see them coming toward me, silently running, their breath white in the morning air. And I always think this: They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?

NOBODY CAN PREDICT WHO’LL MAKE it through BUD/S. The brass tries to figure it out; they bring in psychologists and boost the number of guys beginning the process, hoping more SEALs will be left standing at the end. They tweak the design to create more equal opportunity for minorities, but all that happens is that the instructors do to the students exactly what was done to them, and always 80 percent don’t make it. We have more white SEALs simply because more white guys try out. Eighty percent of white guys fail, 80 percent of Filipinos fail, 80 percent of black guys fail. And the irony is, the Navy doesn’t want an 80 percent failure rate. There can’t be too many SEALs. We’re always undermanned. From the beginning of boot camp, the instructors try separating guys who want to be SEALs. They put them together, feed them better, give them workouts designed to prepare them for BUD/S. These promising rookies get in better shape, are better nourished, and are psychologically primed to go. Then they’re sent to SEAL training and 80 percent fail. No matter what the Navy process tweakers do, they can’t crack it. You’d think the Olympic swimmer would make it. You’d think the pro-football player would make it. But they don’t—well, 80  percent don’t. In my experience, the one category of people who get reliably crushed in BUD/S are that noble demographic, the loudmouths. They’re usually the first to ring the bell. As for who will make it, all I can say is: Are you the person who can convince your body that it can do anything you ask it to? Who can hit the wall and say, “What wall?” That strength of mind isn’t associated with any ethnicity or level of skin pigmentation. It’s not a function of size or musculature or IQ. In the end, it’s sheer cussedness, and I’m guessing you’re either born that way or you never get there.

Then, decades later, in the 1970s, a hard-assed U.S. swim coach named James Counsilman rediscovered it. Counsilman was notorious for his “hurt, pain, and agony”–based training techniques, and hypoventilation fit right in. Competitive swimmers usually take two or three strokes before they flip their heads to the side and inhale. Counsilman trained his team to hold their breath for as many as nine strokes. He believed that, over time, the swimmers would utilize oxygen more efficiently and swim faster. In a sense, it was Buteyko’s Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing and Zátopek hypoventilation—underwater. Counsilman used it to train the U.S. Men’s Swimming team for the Montreal Olympics. They won 13 gold medals, 14 silver, and 7 bronze, and they set world records in 11 events. It was the greatest performance by a U.S. Olympic swim team in history. Hypoventilation training fell back into obscurity after several studies in the 1980s and 1990s argued that it had little to no impact on performance and endurance. Whatever these athletes were gaining, the researchers reported, must have been based on a strong placebo effect. In the early 2000s, Dr. Xavier Woorons, a French physiologist at Paris 13 University, found a flaw in these studies. The scientists critical of the technique had measured it all wrong. They’d been looking at athletes holding their breath with full lungs, and all that extra air in the lungs made it difficult for the athletes to enter into a deep state of hypoventilation. Woorons repeated the tests, but this time subjects practiced the half-full technique, which is how Buteyko trained his patients, and likely how Counsilman trained his swimmers. Breathing less offered huge benefits. If athletes kept at it for several weeks, their muscles adapted to tolerate more lactate accumulation, which allowed their bodies to pull more energy during states of heavy anaerobic stress, and, as a result, train harder and longer. Other reports showed hypoventilation training provided a boost in red blood cells, allowing athletes to carry more oxygen and produce more energy with each breath. Breathing way less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere. Over the years, this style of breath restriction has been given many names—hypoventilation, hypoxic training, Buteyko technique, and the pointlessly technical “normobaric hypoxia training.” The outcomes were the same: a profound boost in performance.* Not just for elite athletes, but for everyone. Just a few weeks of the training significantly increased endurance, reduced more “trunk fat,” improved cardiovascular function, and boosted muscle mass compared to normal-breathing exercise. This list goes on. The takeaway is that hypoventilation works. It helps train the body to do more with less. But that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant.

WBV was originally developed because of its intense workout effect over forty years ago in Russia for their Olympic athletes and space program, and it is currently used widely by athletes around the world, from amateur athletes to top athletes and sports franchises and teams. Originally studied primarily with athletes and healthy young people, more recent studies have also shown promising results with older people.2–6[2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

If I confessed that my nighttime fantasies usually involved me playing on Team Canada at the Olympics, I would probably get pelted with takeaway cups.

Who’s the dead chick?” Chip asked, pointing to Ashley. “She’s not dead,” I told him. “She’s unconscious. And she’s a junior SPYDER agent.” “She’s cute,” Chip said. “Ugh!” Zoe cried. “Chip, she’s evil!” “Maybe on the inside,” Chip told her. “But she’s cute on the outside.” “Is that Ashley Sparks, the gymnast?” Warren asked. “Yes,” I replied. “Though now she’s an evil gymnast.” “She was my favorite!” Warren exclaimed. “She really should have been on the U.S. Olympic team. The judge was blind. She stuck that landing.” “So I’ve heard,” I said. We

Who’s the dead chick?” Chip asked, pointing to Ashley. “She’s not dead,” I told him. “She’s unconscious. And she’s a junior SPYDER agent.” “She’s cute,” Chip said. “Ugh!” Zoe cried. “Chip, she’s evil!” “Maybe on the inside,” Chip told her. “But she’s cute on the outside.” “Is that Ashley Sparks, the gymnast?” Warren asked. “Yes,” I replied. “Though now she’s an evil gymnast.” “She was my favorite!” Warren exclaimed. “She really should have been on the U.S. Olympic team. The judge was blind. She stuck that landing.” “So I’ve heard,” I said.

But as the Olympics began, the North had seemed as if it were experimenting with a friendlier approach. The North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, had sent his sister as a diplomatic emissary to the games and had invited South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, to visit the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. The two countries had even taken the surprising step of combining their Olympic women’s hockey teams in a show of friendship. Why would North Korea launch a disruptive cyberattack in the midst of that charm offensive?

The main racial drama of the Berlin Olympics, at the time and in its retelling, was, of course, the victory of Jesse Owens, the black American sprinter and long jumper who won four gold medals and beat the best of the Germans in unequivocal style.1 However, there were also quiet victories for the Jewish athletes who braved the games. Jewish Hungarians alone won six gold medals, including Ibolya Csák in the high jump, two members of the water-polo team, Karoly Karpati in freestyle wrestling, and the fencers Ilona Schacherer-Elek and Endre Kabos. There were also medals for two Austrian Jews, Ellen Preis and Robert Fein, as well as the American and Canadian basketball players, Samuel Balter and Irving Maretzky.

Juniper Falls, Minnesota might be a small town, but we've produced 18 NHL players, 5 NCAA All-Americans and three Olympians, including a member of the 1980 Miracle on Ice team. Hockey is almost everyone's blood and NHL games are only for people like us; the Olympics are only once every four years. Juniper Falls High School Hockey is a town event. No, it's the town event which is why, outside of the team and our coach, we're all treated like royality.

In the late 1880s, he deployed it to argue for the profound reform of French education, and not just for the elites, but for the masses too. He certainly thought that the English model and its focus on team sports and ball games was preferable to the regimented gymnastics of the German Turnen tradition. Many in France had looked to Prussia, its traditions of nationalist gymnastics, drill and military success, and called for the transformation of French physical education and the armed forces on German lines. Coubertin, by contrast, argued, ‘It is citizens more than soldiers that France needs. It is not militarism that our education needs, but freedom.

Rich Nichols, another attorney, was there in Rochester, too. He had already been in contact with the players as far back as late 2012 through Hope Solo, who was frustrated with the team’s hesitance to take a stronger stance against U.S. Soccer. Solo didn’t know Nichols when she called him for the first time. She believed the national team needed a stronger voice in negotiations, and after asking around, she eventually got Nichols’s name. His highest-profile experience in sports came from representing Olympic track star Marion Jones in doping allegations and serving as general counsel for the American Basketball League, a women’s league that preceded the WNBA. Nichols’s expertise isn’t quite as a trial lawyer, but he speaks with the cadence and tempo of one, knowing which words to emphasize and where to pause for effect. As the players of the national team were debating how to move forward in contract negotiations, Solo called Nichols on her own to see if he could help. Their first conversation centered largely around the idea that the women should demand the same pay as the men’s national team. Nichols and Solo felt a philosophical connection right away. Both outspoken and unafraid to ruffle feathers, they had the same ideas about the tack the national team needed to take.

Rich Nichols became the attorney for the players and the new head of their players association. With that, the tone of the relationship between the national team and the federation was about to take a sharp turn. * * * Nichols’s first major action in his new role was to tell U.S. Soccer that, as far as the players association was concerned, there was no collective bargaining agreement in place and the players could strike if they wanted. U.S. Soccer got the letter on Christmas Eve of 2015. His argument went back to Langel’s memorandum of understanding. An MOU isn’t a CBA, his argument went, and therefore it could be canceled at any time. If that was true and the MOU was canceled, the no-strike provision of the previous CBA would not be in effect, and the players could threaten to boycott the 2016 Olympics. The national team was trying to get back the leverage of a potential strike.

Fans who had only just seen the team win the 2015 World Cup probably weren’t aware of what the players had been through in the past—boycotting games to earn comparable pay to the men, threatening to retire in the face of a lawsuit, asking the U.S. Olympic Committee to intervene, and so on. These sorts of battles were built into the DNA of the team. Their drive to win and their drive to stand up for themselves seemed to go hand in hand. For Lloyd, the appearance on the Today show and the public decision to file the EEOC claim gave the players a chance to help people understand that this sort of substandard treatment was the reality of the women’s national team. She laments that some people mistook the players’ stance as fighting against the men’s team itself, but she says it shined a light on the issues confronting the women’s team. “A lot of people didn’t realize the history of this team and what we’ve had to fight for,” Lloyd says. “When I first joined the team in 2005, they were fighting for salaries, healthcare, pregnancy leave—basic stuff.” Like many American women, the players had their own struggles with equal pay, fair treatment, maternity leave, and other issues that are as endemic in the United States as they are disheartening. As it turned out, even World Cup champions faced the same challenges as other women.