Rio 2016: Why Team USA Exceeded All Expectations

 

The Americans may not have made a ton of friends in Brazil, given their dust-ups with the law, and all that parading around with an index finger either raised in victory or pointed at other teams’ athletes for being dopers, while Team USA itself had 11 members who had previously tested positive for banned substances.
The medal races became an absolute blowout though—even more than The Wall Street Journal predicted. The U.S. won more medals (121) than it has at any Summer Games except 1984, when many of the Soviet countries boycotted.
The Journal got a few things right, or nearly right, in its predictions.

We said the U.S. would win both the overall and gold medal races and that it wouldn’t be very close, largely because U.S. women would be so exceptional. They were. American women out-medaled the men 61-55 and out-golded them 27-18. Another five medals, including one gold, came in mixed competitions.
We had the U.S. winning 42 gold medals. They won 46. We got the order of the top five countries in the overall medal count correct. Predicting Russia was a massive puzzle, since the makeup of their team kept changing. In the end we settled on 16 gold medals and 51 overall. The Russians will leave Rio with 19 gold medals and 56 overall. We had the French winning 12 and 43; they won 10 and 42.
That said there were a few big miscalculations. We expected Great Britain to fall back to earth after its triumphant showing at home in London in 2012, where Team GB won 29 gold medals and 65 overall, beating out the Russians in the gold medal count. (That is the count the rest of the world cares most about.) Instead, the Brits got to 67 overall medals and finished second in the gold medal race—ahead of China—with 27.

Jason Kenny and Laura Trott of Great Britain pose with their gold medals at Rio Olympic Velodrome. Clearly, the massive British investment in sports in the run-up to the London Games is continuing to pay dividends, especially in cycling, where the Brits are nearly unbeatable. China, meanwhile, which won the gold medal race at home in Beijing in 2008, has taken a steep dive. The Journal had the Chinese, who are masters of precision sports, winning 35 gold medals and 82 overall. They finished with 26 and 70.

We were long on the Australians, forecasting 17 gold medals and 48 overall. They stunk, winning just eight gold medals and 29 overall, which is four fewer than the U.S. won just in the pool.
That swimming and ultimately track drove the U.S. medal count wasn’t a surprise. That’s the American formula. But the extent of the American success in those events was stunning.
We predicted 102 overall medals for the U.S. That made sense considering the relatively poor performances at last year’s world championships in swimming and track and field. In the swimming championships in Kazan, Russia, in 2015, the U.S. won just 23 medals in
a meet with more events than at the Olympics. There was even a women’s 1,500, a non-Olympic event that is one of Katie Ledecky’s automatic golds.
Michael Phelps wasn’t in Kazan because he was serving a suspension, but coming into the Games, no swimmer as old as Phelps, who is 31, had won an individual gold medal. His recent times were significantly slower than the competition this year. Other U.S. Olympic rookies had never beaten the best in the world on a big stage before. Betting on Anthony Ervin, who is 35-years-old and last won the 50-meter freestyle in 2000 in Sydney, would have been silly.
We know how that all went—16 gold medals and 33 overall for
U.S. swimmers.
In track and field, Americans won six gold medals and 18 overall at the 2015 world championships. Thanks to an incredibly deep team and surprise wins from the likes of Matt Centrowitz in the 1,500 meters, they nearly doubled both those totals, leaving the track with 13 gold medals and 31 overall, which was even better than their dominant performance in London.
What gives? Making the U.S. team is ridiculously competitive. Swimmers have to finish in the top two in their races at the Olympic trials, while runners have to finish in the top three. That makes athletes train especially hard in Olympic years, and they arrive at the Games prepared to outdo whatever they have done in the
recent past.
If Phelps comes out of retirement at 35 in 2020, we won’t bet against him again.