Japan upsets U.S. for softball gold
OLYMPIC SOFTBALL
Americans are denied a fourth consecutive Olympic title with a 3-1 loss.
BEIJING -- Afterward, as his players sat grim-faced and stricken, their silver medal a shiny symbol of rare failure, U.S. softball Coach Mike Candrea would tell them he was proud of them. And he would tell them something else.
"As athletes, it's awfully tough to handle disappointment but that's athletics," he said. "As I told the girls tonight, 'There are going to be other things in life that are more tragic than tonight.' "
Candrea knows tragedy. He lost his wife, Sue, to a brain aneurysm just weeks before the 2004 Athens Olympics. But he was not issuing ominous warnings as much as trying to put the U.S. team's 3-1 loss to Japan in Thursday night's gold-medal game into perspective.
"I think these young ladies are very well prepared for what life has for them in the future and I'm very proud of them," Candrea said. "We will move on."
Surely, they will. But as an Olympic sport, softball will not.
In July 2005, the International Olympic Committee voted to drop baseball and softball from the 2012 Games.
Many theories abound, including one that had steroid use in American baseball leading the IOC to eliminate the sport, and softball got caught in the fray. Another suggestion was that the decision had been political.
But the most common theory was that the U.S. women were just too good for their own good.
Winning the first three Olympic softball gold medals in convincing fashion leading up to Beijing only added fuel to that argument. And as the U.S. steamed into the gold medal game against Japan having outscored its opponents 57-2 in this tournament and 108-3 over the last two Olympics, it was hard for the Americans to protest very convincingly.
Their flat loss to Japan -- decided by uncharacteristically sloppy play defensively and a typically opportunistic and powerful offense leaving seven runners on base -- did not merely frustrate the Americans. It made them combative.
"It's the people on the outside that really don't understand the game and really thought we were so dominant," Candrea said. "We've played great softball. But if you're in the dugout and on this team, you know that any team can get hot on any given night. We have a lot of respect for Japan. They matched us pitch for pitch and got the key hit when they needed to.
