Culture
Team USA may have 'woke a monster' by not picking Clark for Olympics
INDIANAPOLIS — There are few teams, if any, Caitlin Clark hasn’t made in her life.
Team USA’s Olympic team is one of them.
Indiana Fever coach Christie Sides revealed Sunday after practice that they were on the team bus when Clark — the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer and the No. 1 pick in the 2024 Draft — recently found out that she didn’t make the cut to represent the U.S. at the Paris Olympics.
Her response?
“’Hey, coach, they woke a monster,’” Sides said, reciting Clark.
#IndianaFever HC Christie Sides said they were on the bus when Caitlin Clark found out she didn’t make Team USA. Clark then told her, “Hey coach, they woke a monster.”
I asked Sides how much more “monster” there is to wake up.
“That’s pretty scary, right?” | @TheAthleticWBB pic.twitter.com/3egzCyJBA8
— James Boyd (@RomeovilleKid) June 9, 2024
Free, daily sports updates direct to your inbox. Sign up
Free, daily sports updates direct to your inbox. Sign up
Buy
Although an official roster has yet to be announced, Clark was not one of the 12 players selected, sources briefed on the decision said Saturday. Clark confirmed the decision Sunday, saying she recently received a call from USA Basketball that her first Olympic experience will have to wait.
“Honestly, no disappointment,” Clark said. “I think it just gives you something to work for. That’s a dream. Hopefully one day I can be there.
“I think it’s just a little more motivation. You remember that. Hopefully in four years, when four years comes back around, I can be there.”
Only four players have ever made the Olympic team the same year they finished their college careers: Diana Taurasi in 2004, Candace Parker and Sylvia Fowles in 2008, and Breanna Stewart in 2016.
More from #IndianaFever’s Caitlin Clark on not making the Olympic roster:
“There’s still a lot of positives in the time that I’m gonna have off. …”
Asked if she’d play as an injury replacement, she said it would be “a great opportunity” but was noncommittal.
“A lot of ifs.” pic.twitter.com/sjIiONLsAr
— James Boyd (@RomeovilleKid) June 9, 2024
In passing on the 22-year-old Clark, USA Basketball ultimately leaned toward a more veteran and accomplished roster featuring Taurasi, Stewart, A’ja Wilson, Brittney Griner, Alyssa Thomas, Napheesa Collier, Jewell Loyd, Kelsey Plum, Jackie Young, Sabrina Ionescu, Chelsea Gray and Kahleah Copper. The youngest players in that group are Ionescu and Young, who are both 26. Ionescu is a two-time All-Star and two-time All-WNBA Second-Team honoree, while Young is also a two-time All-Star, made the All-WNBA Second Team last year and was named the league’s Most Improved Player in 2022.
Clark is aware of the talent and merit of the players chosen over her, calling the Olympic squad “the most competitive team in the world.” The 12-woman roster combines for 18 championship rings, four league MVPs, seven Finals MVPs, 42 all-WNBA selections and 55 All-Star selections. Team USA is also 70-3 all-time in Olympic play, hasn’t lost an Olympic contest since 1992 and hasn’t lost a tournament game overall since 2006. The program is eyeing its eighth consecutive Olympic gold medal, which would break a tie with the men’s side (1936 to 1968) for the most consecutive Olympic team gold medals in history.
“We all know how talented that team is,” Clark said. “You look at that roster, (there are) a lot of players I’ve already had the opportunity to play (against) in this league that are just so good, and I know they’re gonna go out there and dominate, and I’m gonna be watching and cheering for them. It’ll be a lot of fun.”
Asked if she’d consider joining the team as an injury replacement, Clark said it would be “a great opportunity” but was noncommittal. She added that Team USA is already “in pretty good hands” with the 12 players who were initially chosen.
While Clark said she was excited to watch her countrywomen, her coach made it clear that the self-proclaimed “monster” would rather be playing alongside them.
Caitlin Clark shared a message with Fever head coach Christie Sides after finding out she did not make Team USA Women’s Basketball Olympic roster 😤
via @RomeovilleKid pic.twitter.com/5b8DqCmQ0Z
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) June 9, 2024
“That’s pretty scary, right?” Sides said of Clark using her Olympic omission as motivation. “She’s one of the most competitive people that I know. But she’s a worker, and that’s what she’s gonna do. This just gave her another opportunity to get in the gym and do more work.”
Clark is averaging 16.8 points, 6.3 assists and 5.3 rebounds through 12 WNBA games. She was named the WNBA Rookie of the Month for May after leading all rookies in points per game, field goals made, 3-point field goals made, free throws made and minutes played.
After being held to just three points — her career-low in college and the WNBA — in a loss at New York on June 2, Clark bounced back five days later by nailing a career-high seven 3s en route to tying her career-high with 30 points in a win at Washington. It still hasn’t been smooth sailing for Clark, who is shooting just 37.3 percent from the field and leads the league with 5.6 turnovers per game.
Even before her pro career began, Clark was one of 14 players to receive an invite to the U.S. national team’s final Cleveland-based training camp in April ahead of the Summer Games. The rookie may have had a better chance to make the Olympic team had she played directly with and against the players in the pool. However, although Clark was in Cleveland at the time, she was unable to attend the camp because Iowa advanced to the Final Four. The Hawkeyes ultimately lost in the national championship against undefeated South Carolina.
Despite the quick turnaround from her illustrious college career and her highly-anticipated pro debut, Clark still wanted to represent her country in the Olympics. But she’s not complaining about having a midseason pause to recharge and refocus after the Fever’s staggering start. Indiana played 11 games in 19 days to begin the season, the most compact schedule since Washington played 11 games in 20 days to open the 2007 campaign. The Fever will play its last game before the Olympic break at Dallas on July 17 and will resume play Aug. 17 at home against Phoenix.
“It’s gonna be really nice,” Clark said about the anticipated break. “I’ve loved competing every single second, but it’s gonna be a great month for my body to first of all get rest and get healthy, and just get a little time away from basketball and the craziness of everything that’s been going on and just find some peace and quiet for myself.
“But then additionally, it’s a great opportunity for us to work and get better.”
Required reading
(Photo: G Fiume / Getty Images)
A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and — maybe especially — the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.
The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.
And then it bursts into flame.
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” comes from Glück’s debut collection, “Firstborn,” which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters — sex, love, illness, family life — that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t explain.
Here, for example, Glück assembles fragments of experience that imply — but also obscure — a larger narrative. It’s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.
We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It’s hard not to wonder if they’re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.
To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Glück’s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Glück, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.
But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after “Firstborn,” on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Glück celebrated the “intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine” relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for “poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.”
That’s the kind of poem she wrote.
“Confidence” can have two meanings, both of which apply to “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.
Where there is power, there’s also risk. To give voice to desire — to whisper or cry “I want you” — is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It’s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.
What happens next? That’s up to you.
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
Even Indiana-Kentucky basketball rivalry couldn’t resist HeisMendoza chants
Photos: LSU women defeats Louisiana Tech in the Smoothie King Center, 87-61
Chanukah’s message shines brightly during Maine’s darkest season | Opinion
4 takeaways from Michigan Basketball’s 101-83 win at Maryland
Yaxel Lendeborg scores 29 points and No. 2 Michigan stays unbeaten with 101-83 win over Maryland
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Video: ‘It Didn’t Have to Happen This Way:’ U.Va. Faculty Call for Review of Police Response to Protests
Video: At Least Two Killed in Shooting at Brown University
FBI ousts reinstated whistleblower over unauthorized media talks, ‘poor judgment’
EU dismisses Russia’s lawsuit against Euroclear as ‘speculative’
Multiple people shot near Brown University, police say
Inside Minnesota’s $1B fraud: fake offices, phony firms and a scandal hiding in plain sight
-
Alaska1 week agoHowling Mat-Su winds leave thousands without power
-
Texas1 week agoTexas Tech football vs BYU live updates, start time, TV channel for Big 12 title
-
Ohio1 week agoWho do the Ohio State Buckeyes hire as the next offensive coordinator?
-
Washington5 days agoLIVE UPDATES: Mudslide, road closures across Western Washington
-
Iowa7 days agoMatt Campbell reportedly bringing longtime Iowa State staffer to Penn State as 1st hire
-
Miami, FL7 days agoUrban Meyer, Brady Quinn get in heated exchange during Alabama, Notre Dame, Miami CFP discussion
-
Cleveland, OH6 days agoMan shot, killed at downtown Cleveland nightclub: EMS
-
World6 days ago
Chiefs’ offensive line woes deepen as Wanya Morris exits with knee injury against Texans
