United States Athletic Teams

The fastest 50-meter freestyle swimmers in the world last year were Americans Matt Biondi, Tom Jager and Steve Crocker. But only two of them will advance from the Olympic trials, March 1-6 in Indianapolis, to the Olympic Games, starting July 25 in Barcelona, Spain. In response to U.S. swimming dominance, FINA, the world governing body of the sport, decreased the number of entrants allowed each country from three per event to two in 1980. Other international meets followed suit.

U.S. national team Coach Juergen Klinsmann called 29 players into training camp for next month's trio of World Cup qualifiers and, as expected, the Galaxy's Landon Donovan was left off the list. However Galaxy teammate Omar Gonzalez was among those called up Thursday. He will join the team after L.A.'s May 26 match with Seattle. The U.S. will play friendlies with Belgium and Germany before returning to the final round of regional World Cup qualifying June 7 in Jamaica. The U.S., currently third in its six-team qualifying group, will then play host to Panama on June 11 in Seattle and Honduras a week later in suburban Salt Lake City.

Some were born and raised here. Others--such as the U.S. Olympic water polo teams--took up residence in Orange County while training for the 2000 Olympics.

Lalo Rodriguez Plata once roamed the back line at aging Estadio Tecnologico, anchoring a stout defense as captain of the Monterrey Rayados of Mexico's First Division. But nearly three decades have passed since then, so Rodriguez insists there will be no split loyalties when his nephew, Omar Gonzalez, steps to the same back line for the visiting Galaxy in Wednesday's CONCACAF Champions League semifinal against his old team. "I don't work for Monterrey," Rodriguez says in Spanish.

The children at the junior high in Carson listened carefully as Frank Lubin, a former U.S. Olympic basketball player, spoke during a recent career day. Lubin told the youngsters to stay in school and to avoid drugs and alcohol because they had the potential to be Olympic athletes. When Lubin was finished, they pestered him for autographs. It was the repeat of a scene from the early part of the century.

Two of the five members of the United States equestrian show jumping squad for the 1988 Olympics are West Coast natives, Anne Kursinski of Pasadena and Lisa Jacquin of Rancho Palos Verdes. That's a bit of an upset, considering the many competitive international show jumping riders that America's East Coast traditionally produces. But Jacquin and Kursinski have one more step to climb before their participation in the events is guaranteed. They have to prove to the U.S.

David Robinson and Danny Manning head the list of players invited to begin training later this month for berths on the U.S. Olympic basketball teams. Also invited to Georgetown University July 17 were Willie Anderson, Stacey Augmon, Vernell Coles, Sean Elliott, Danny Ferry, Jeff Grayer, Hersey Hawkins, Randolph Keys, Todd Lichti, Dan Majerle, Alonzo Mourning, Dyron Nix, J.R. Reid, Mitch Richmond, Dwayne Schintzius, Brian Shaw, Charles Smith of Georgetown and Charles Smith of Pittsburgh.

It's just another nondescript building in an industrial park wedged between the freeway and train tracks in Laguna Niguel. A transmission place is next door. An auto body shop is across the driveway. Olympic training site? Not likely, unless demolition derby is the newest Olympic sport. But in the parking lot there is a sign posted outside the building: "Attention: Do Not Expose or Handle Firearms in the Parking Lot." The building houses an indoor shooting range. Bill Demarest, U.S.

It is difficult to picture Tony Jelso as a quitter--a guy who would walk off the court in the middle of a national racquetball tournament saying he'd had it. In the wake of his dominating gold-medal performance in the U.S. Olympic Festival last week, it seems unimaginable that Jelso would ever be eager to pack his bags and slip out the back door. Jelso, 23, of Ventura, was running Chris Cole of Flint, Mich.

Tim Daggett, the United States' top gymnast at the World Gymnastics Championships, fell and broke his left leg in competition Thursday. The accident occurred while Daggett was competing in the vault event of the team competition. A loud crack sounded as he landed. He stumbled backward and crumbled to the floor. "It's a fracture of the lower left leg. But it is not a complicated fracture," a medical official said.

The deficits were there, overwhelmingly and stunningly. They're the reason Kerri Walsh Jennings cried at the end. Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor came back twice from uniquely ominous places to pull out a 22-20, 22-20 victory in a women's Olympic beach volleyball semifinal match Tuesday against China's Xue Chen and Zhang Xi. Strikingly, a third gold medal might not be out of the question for the U.S. tandem in its last tournament after...

The finish to Alexandra Raisman's Olympics was so much more fabulous than the start. Raisman, an 18-year-old from Needham, Mass., who was often overlooked on this U.S. women's gymnastics team, did something no American woman has ever done. She won the Olympic gold medal in floor exercise. When Romanian Sandra Izbasa, the reigning Olympic floor champion, landed her last tumbling pass on her head and shoulder, Raisman could finally smile. Earlier Tuesday, Raisman had also won a bronze medal on the balance beam, but only after her coach protested her initial low score of 14.966.

Kayla Harrison promised herself she wouldn't cry if she were lucky enough to make it to the top step of the Olympic medal stand Thursday. It's a promise she kept all the way until the second note of "The Star-Spangled Banner," when she broke down in tears. "I was reflecting back on my life and everything that it's taken to get here. And everything that I've gone through," Harrison said after becoming the first Olympic champion in U.S. judo history by winning the women's 78-kilogram event.

Michael Phelps might be one day from retirement, but this is still his time. Phelps, the old master, vanquished Ryan Lochte one last time Thursday. Tyler Clary, for so long the understudy to the two headline acts in American swimming, whipped Lochte too. That left Lochte 0 for 2 in gold medals on Thursday, two for six in London. To Americans conditioned by Phelps' eight-for-eight golden run in Beijing, Lochte's oft-repeated "This is my time" proclamation appeared awfully hollow.

The leader after one rotation of the Olympic gymnastics women's all-around competition? Gabrielle Douglas. After two rotations: Gabrielle Douglas. After three rotations: Gabrielle Douglas. And after four rotations -- the vault that requires precise strength, the uneven bars that ask for daredevil will and the desire to fly, the skinny balance beam that begs an athlete to fall off, the floor exercise that has a boundary that isn't always easy to respect -- the winner? Gabrielle Douglas.

On second thought, maybe the original Dream Team was better. So says Kobe Bryant, who lighted a metaphorical fire around his feet earlier this month by saying this year's U.S. team would beat the original cast of NBA stars from 1992. This time, though, Bryant indicated that Michael, Magic and Larry were more talented than LeBron, Kevin Durant and himself. "I didn't say we were a better team," Bryant said Friday amid a mob of reporters at an introductory Olympic news conference.

The 1992 Olympic basketball team is perhaps the best ever, but it was only the second best team on the court Wednesday. The developmental squad made up of top college players defeated the Olympic team in a 20-minute scrimmage. No one was disclosing the final score, but the collegians won by eight points. "We got killed today," Michael Jordan said. "They beat us and they played well. We're so out of sync and so unsure about things that we feel comfortable with in normal situations.

When a 15-year-old finishes second at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials, the news is hardly earth-shattering these days. Change the gender from female to male and it takes on fascinating implications. Michael Phelps of Baltimore turned 15 on June 30, and Saturday he was transformed into an Olympian, placing second in the 200-meter butterfly in a personal-best 1 minute 57.48 seconds. Tom Malchow, who was on pace for the first 100 to break his own world record, finished first in 1:56.87.

The men's gymnastics Olympics team qualification competition begins Saturday at the North Greenwich Arena and, surprisingly, the rock stars aren't the high-flying Chinese men who won seven of eight available gold medals in Beijing, or the toast of Twitter, the U.S. men, who seem to be asked by every girl in the world for a retweet. Kohei Uchimura, a modest 23-year-old from Japan who bows his head when spoken to and always points his toes, even when he's doing two or three twists on a particular apparatus, will be the focus even during the team competition.

Me, I'm pulling for Lochte. The rivalry doing flip turns through the first week of these Olympics surfaced Thursday with an unsettling splash. In preparation for a news conference featuring the U.S. swim team, officials set up eight name placards on a stage ... before suddenly removing six. Michael Phelps and his personal coach, Bob Bowman, would speak first, and speak alone. Ryan Lochte and the rest of the team's stars would speak later. Said Phelps: "We're all our own people.