List Of Olympic Medalists In Basketball
Basketball is a sport contested at the Summer Olympic Games. A men's basketball tournament was first held at the 1904 Olympics as a demonstration; it has been held at every Summer Olympics since 1936. In the 1972 Olympics, the final game between the United States and the Soviet Union was a controversial one, as the game was ended and replayed twice by a FIBA (International Basketball Federation) official without the authority to do so, before the Soviet Union won their first gold medal, which would have been won by the United States if the game was not started against the rules. The U.S. filed a formal protest but was rejected by FIBA. As a result, the United States refused to accept the silver medal, and no player has ever claimed his medal. After a protest of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the United States boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The Soviet Union responded by leading the 1984 Summer Olympics boycott, citing security concerns in the United States. Both boycotts affected basketball at the Olympics, as both had successful basketball teams at the time. In 1989, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to allow professional athletes to compete in the Olympics, and starting in 1992, the National Basketball Association (NBA) allowed its players to participate. Women's basketball was first held at the 1976 Summer Olympics. Both events have been held at every Olympic Games since.
The USA's Teresa Edwards is the all-time leader for the most Olympic medals in basketball, with four gold and one bronze. Five athletes have won four medals: the USA's Lisa Leslie (four gold), the Soviet Union's Gennadi Volnov (one gold, two silver, one bronze) and Sergei Belov (one gold, three bronze), and Australians Kristi Harrower and Lauren Jackson (both with three silvers and one bronze). Leslie is the all-time leader for the most consecutive gold medal wins in basketball. Eight individuals, all American women, have won three golds—Edwards, Leslie, Katie Smith, Dawn Staley, Sheryl Swoopes, Sue Bird, Tamika Catchings, and Diana Taurasi—and 23 other players, not including the previously mentioned, have won three medals.
The United States have been successful in both the men's and women's tournaments, winning a medal in every Olympiad except the 1980 Summer Olympics, which it boycotted. The Soviet Union is the only other country to have won 12 medals in the men's and women's tournaments, 10 of which were won from 1952 to 1980. Two other countries have won five medals: Australia (all women's) and Brazil (three men's, two women's). As of the 2012 Summer Olympics, 84 medals (28 of each color) have been awarded to teams from 19 National Olympic Committees.
Two gold medal-winning teams, both U.S. men's teams, were inducted to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010. The 1960 team featured four players who would eventually enter the Hall of Fame, a head coach who would enter the Hall as a contributor, and a team manager who entered the Hall as a coach. The 1992 team, better known as the "Dream Team", had 11 future Hall of Fame players, along with three coaches who were inducted to the Hall as coaches (one of whom was previously inducted separately for his accomplishments as a player).
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“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)