Caitlin Clark, like 99.99 p.c of People this summer time, won’t be a part of the 2024 US girls’s Olympic basketball staff. Formally, the staff will probably be introduced on Sunday, however in response to stories and Clark herself, she didn’t make the 12-woman roster.
In contrast to the remainder of us watching, nevertheless, Clark possesses world-class capturing vary, gorgeous passing imaginative and prescient, and a record-setting scoring capacity. These attributes have made her the No. 1 choose on this 12 months’s WNBA draft and the most-watched girls’s basketball participant on the planet. Her video games have set viewership and ticket gross sales data.
With all of the expertise, hype, and a spotlight, Clark staying house this summer time is a shock to many. Hundreds of thousands of individuals have been instructed that Clark is arguably the perfect girls’s participant on the planet and inarguably its greatest star, and now she will not be a 2024 Olympian. Some critics are even saying that is the worst basketball determination the US has ever made.
Clark herself congratulated the Olympic squad, stated it’s essentially the most troublesome staff to make, and that she hopes to be in Los Angeles in 2028. “I am excited for the ladies which are on the staff,” Clark stated this weekend after an Indiana Fever follow. “I used to be a child that grew up watching the Olympics. It will be enjoyable to look at them.”
In contrast to roster alternatives previously, Clark not making the reduce has triggered an inflammatory response, with some calling into query the integrity of the girls who made it as a substitute of her and even the integrity of america. These excessive reactions stem from a harmful and more and more in style subtext about Caitlin Clark’s greatness, one which paints Clark as a transcendent star and her friends as terminally jealous people. The wild gist: Clark must be protected against her fellow gamers.
It’s grow to be clear that these Caitlin Clark followers aren’t all that fascinated with girls’s basketball and even Clark herself however, relatively, seem like deeply invested in pulling the brilliant younger basketball star right into a tradition warfare that she doesn’t appear all that fascinated with being part of.
Over the previous couple of years, the rise of Caitlin Clark has been one of many greatest tales in sports activities. Clark’s sport — prolific scoring, deep capturing vary, full-court passes — is thrilling to look at. Sports activities media has even created the time period “the Caitlin Clark impact” to check with the ticket gross sales and hundreds of thousands in TV viewership that Clark is accountable for. All over the place Clark performs, whether or not it’s the College of Iowa, her alma mater, or the Indiana Fever, her present WNBA staff, individuals need to see her sport.
For girls’s basketball, a sport that’s been neglected and overshadowed by its male counterpart, the eye paid to Clark has been an achievement. Her video games draw the sort of viewership that the NBA does, and identical goes for title recognition. I’d wager that extra individuals would be capable to title Caitlin Clark than final 12 months’s NBA rookie of the 12 months (Victor Wembanyama).
Whereas that spotlight has raised girls’s basketball’s profile, it’s additionally dropped at mild some extraordinarily bizarre, unsavory habits from her followers and the media.
Final 12 months, within the 2023 Nationwide Championship, Angel Reese was the topic of a nationwide dialog about her conduct after she taunted Clark within the ultimate minutes — one thing Clark had carried out to her opponents all through her match run. As a substitute of being seen as enjoyable or assured (as Clark’s antics had been portrayed by media and basketball followers) Reese’s chaff was dubbed “classless” or, as Keith Olbermann, a former ESPN anchor tweeted, “a fucking fool.” Because the pile-on grew and Reese discovered herself in the midst of a nationwide dialog about her character, Clark went to bat for her, reminding the fan base: “I get to play this sport and have emotion and put on it on my sleeves, and so does everybody else … I don’t suppose Angel needs to be criticized in any respect.”
Clark is getting at just a few issues right here. For one, there’s the double commonplace of how she was handled by followers versus how her Black friends are handled, but in addition the deeply associated concept that she warrants some sort of added benevolence that different gamers don’t. As Clark has moved to the WNBA, this narrative that Clark wants safety has solely grown.
Clark’s fellow WNBA gamers are being portrayed within the media as petty and jealous of her accomplishments. Aliyah Boston, Clark’s teammate and reigning WNBA rookie of the 12 months, has restricted her social media after receiving hate from followers on-line for underperforming. Earlier this month, Chicago Sky participant Chennedy Carter fouled Clark with a shoulder test that the WNBA later upgraded to a extra severe foul. Clark stated that the foul was within the warmth of the second and that there’s no want for an apology.
Nonetheless, the foul spurred an editorial from the Chicago Tribune and a WNBA inquiry from a sitting member of Congress. Extra alarming is that Carter and her Sky teammates stated they have been stalked and harassed by a person outdoors a staff lodge in Washington, DC, and wanted safety to deal with the scenario. Clearly, not all of Clark’s followers are of the stalker selection, but it surely’s not precisely a shock that somebody would harass the Sky staff so long as distinguished individuals maintain pushing the false narrative that Clark wants safety from jealous gamers — even when Clark herself has quashed that concept a number of occasions.
Clark’s prominence and the dialog surrounding her have just lately caught the eye of right-wing personalities, like former Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley. Haley tweeted about Clark’s Olympic omission, implying that the ladies on the US staff weren’t the perfect US gamers and that Clark had been shortchanged: “I feel the Olympic choice committee needs to be requested: Do we would like the perfect staff to characterize our nation or not?”
The notion that the US isn’t nearly as good because it was and the individuals representing the US — the staff is predominantly Black and contains LGBTQ gamers — aren’t its finest aligns with political messages that Haley used on the marketing campaign path to attraction to voters. It appears Haley is extra fascinated with positioning Clark’s basketball profession as a tradition warfare and interesting her base than she is invested in Clark as a participant. Six months in the past, throughout a marketing campaign cease that doubled as a Hawkeyes tailgate in Coralville, Iowa, Haley referred to Clark as Kaitlan Collins, who is definitely a CNN anchor.
Opposite to Haley’s opinion, Clark thinks the Olympic staff is America’s finest. “It’s essentially the most aggressive staff on the planet … I’m going to be rooting for them to win gold,” Clark stated in a huddle with reporters on June 9.
The argument for Caitlin making the Olympic staff
The apparent query surrounding Clark’s omission from the staff is whether or not or not she was ok to make it. However that doesn’t include a transparent reply, primarily as a result of the standards for making Crew USA has lengthy been subjective and typically relentlessly opaque.
The choice committee has, lately, made some head-scratching selections.
Again in 2016, Candace Parker — a future Corridor-of-Famer and one of many sport’s biggest gamers — was left off the staff. Parker, who was 30 in 2016, was one the perfect gamers on the planet and helped the US win gold in 2008 and 2012. She has stated that she thinks UConn’s Geno Auriemma, who was teaching the nationwide staff on the time, didn’t need her on the staff. Breanna Stewart, a current graduate who Auriemma had coached at UConn, was the one participant underneath the age of 25 taken.
Then in 2021 (the Olympics have been delayed due to the pandemic), Nneka Ogwumike was left off. Ogwumike, a perennial all-star and MVP (like Parker), was additionally 30 on the time. Daybreak Staley, the present coach at South Carolina and nationwide coach on the time, cited uncertainty over a knee damage as the rationale Ogwumike was not chosen.
The teachings from these previous two Olympic snubs is that it’s fairly clear that Crew USA isn’t the 12 “finest” gamers and that there’s priority for taking a youthful participant over a confirmed participant of their prime. Crew USA may also err on the facet of warning in the case of accidents.
These arguments may need labored in Clark’s favor. She’s younger (like Stewart was in 2016) and is popping in a superb rookie season. Clark is averaging 16.8 factors per sport, 5.3 rebounds per sport, and 6.3 assists per sport within the WNBA. She ranks fourth in the case of the league’s leaders in assists per sport and performs level guard, a place that the US isn’t terribly deep in — Angel Reese and Cameron Brink, Clark’s fellow rookies, are additionally having good seasons however play front-court positions the place the US is loaded. Brink made the 3×3 Olympic basketball staff.
Chelsea Grey, a 2020 Olympic gold medalist and level guard for the Las Vegas Aces, is on the 2024 staff. She hasn’t performed within the WNBA this 12 months after a foot damage saved her out of the WNBA finals final 12 months. Grey and Clark play the identical place. Additional, Diana Taurasi — a five-time girls’s basketball gold medalist — may also be going to Paris regardless of averaging fewer factors, rebounds, and assists than Clark this season.
The issue is, when you may make an argument that Grey and Taurasi ought to have been left off rather than Clark, there are additionally a few gamers — 2020 Olympic gold medalist Skylar Diggins Smith and WNBA scoring extraordinaire Arike Ogunbowale — who’re having higher seasons than Clark on this second who additionally aren’t going. Clark’s sport, whereas good, is marred by her 5.6 turnovers per sport and lack of toughness on protection.
Maybe essentially the most fascinating argument in all of that is that this complete kerfuffle is over a minuscule quantity of minutes on the tip of the bench.
Whether or not or not it’s Taurasi, Grey, or Clark, the backup level guard will probably be the final spot known as to play. That theoretical lack of minutes was really an element, in response to two nameless USA Basketball sources who spoke to USA At present. They instructed the paper that the “concern over how Clark’s hundreds of thousands of followers would react to what would probably be restricted taking part in time on a stacked roster was an element within the determination making.”
If that reporting is to be believed, then there’s some merciless symmetry that Clark’s followers — particularly the poisonous ones — could have been a part of the choice course of in protecting her off the roster. Leaving Clark off the staff due to an anticipated backlash to meager minutes looks as if a kind of head-scratching, less-than-transparent causes.
In the end, the one particular person immediately affected by Caitlin Clark’s Olympic omission is Clark, and he or she isn’t letting 2024’s disappointment have an effect on her future. “It is a dream. I feel it is just a bit extra motivation,” she instructed reporters this weekend. “You keep in mind that. Hopefully, when 4 years comes round, I could be there.”
