Jessica Springsteen, the equestrian daughter of legendary rock star Bruce Springsteen, is not going to be representing the United States again in this year’s Olympics despite doing so in Tokyo in 2021. 

USA Equestrian revealed its jumping team for the Paris Olympics on Saturday afternoon, and Springsteen wasn’t on it. 

Instead, veteran riders Kent Farrington, Laura Kraut and McLain Ward were in the three spots, with Karl Cook named as the team’s alternate. 

Springsteen, 32, was with Kraut and Ward at the Toyko Olympics, helping them collect a silver medal to mark the fourth medal in the past five Olympics for the Americans in the event. Springsteen was riding her 12-year-old stallion named Don Juan van de Donkhoeve. 

She was tracking to make the team this year, being named one of 10 on the U.S. Jumping Team’s short list for the Olympics in April. U.S. Equestrian said in a press release at the time that those 10 athletes would be “chosen for continued observation.”

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However, Springsteen’s status in rankings didn’t match up with where she was three years ago. 

According to the International Federation of Equestrian Sports’ official website, Springsteen is ranked 127th in the world after being 14th in 2021. 

Jessica Springsteen rides in the Douglas Elliman Grand Prix Qualifier at the Hampton Classic Horse Show on Sept. 1, 2023, in Bridgehampton, New York. (Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images)

Farrington (6th), Ward, (15th), Kraut (35th) and Cook (23rd) are all much higher in the rankings than Springsteen. 

Springsteen expressed the desire to keep competing with hopes of reaching the Olympics during an interview in May with Harper’s Bazaar.

“Tokyo 2020 was such an incredible experience, but because of that year and all the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, you know, you couldn’t have your family and your friends there,” Springsteen explained. “So I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I would love to go to another Olympics and be able to share that with my family, who’ve been so supportive of my career for so many years.’”

Jessica Springsteen rides Naomi van het Keizershof during the CSI5* – International Competition N5 presented by Crivelli – Verona Jumping at 125th Fieracavalli on Nov. 11, 2023, Verona, Italy. (Roberto Tommasini/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Her father actually had a two-week block in his touring schedule set aside during the Olympics. And though that’s not officially the reason behind the tour break, one would think it worked perfectly for Springsteen to see his daughter if she made the team. 

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The eighth-inning home runs that propelled the Dodgers to a 5-3 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers in front of a crowd of 50,086 in Chavez Ravine on Saturday were as different as the men who hit them.

The first, by Miguel Vargas, a 24-year-old reserve outfielder from Cuba who is making the major league-minimum $740,000, was a towering 368-foot drive that landed on top of the left-field wall, just out of the reach of Milwaukee outfielder Christian Yelich. The pinch-hit shot to lead off the bottom of the eighth snapped a 3-3 tie.

“He put a good swing on a [fastball] that was really inside and kept it fair,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “But I didn’t know if it had enough steam to get out.”

The second, by Shohei Ohtani, a 30-year-old slugger from Japan who signed a 10-year, $700-million deal in December, had the steam of a geyser, the one-out laser leaving Ohtani’s bat at 110 mph and traveling 430 feet to right-center to give the Dodgers a 5-3 lead and Ohtani a National League-leading 28 homers.

“I was certain of that one, yeah,” Roberts said. “That was a no-doubter for me.”

A long ball by Vargas and an even longer ball by Ohtani took Roberts off the hook for a strategic decision that backfired in the top of the eighth.

The Dodgers held a 3-2 lead after right-handers Daniel Hudson (sixth) and Blake Treinen (seventh) threw scoreless innings in relief of starter James Paxton, and Roberts turned to closer Evan Phillips to face the heart of the Brewers order — William Contreras, Yelich and Willy Adames — in the eighth.

Roberts had used the strategy successfully this season, most recently in a June 24 game at Chicago, when Phillips threw a scoreless eighth inning against the White Sox to protect a 2-0 lead and left-hander Alex Vesia closed the ninth inning of a 3-0 win.

Phillips struck out Contreras to open the eighth on Saturday, but he hung a 2-and-2 sweeper to the left-handed-hitting Yelich, who lined a 429-foot homer to center field to tie the score 3-3. Vesia threw a one-two-three ninth for his fifth save.

“It was a right-left thing,” Roberts said. “I feel confident with Alex against either, but I liked getting the right-hander on Contreras and Adames. [Phillips] left a sweeper middle-middle. If I had to do it over again, I’d do the same thing.”

The score was not knotted for long thanks to Vargas, who is making a push for more playing time with his productive bat, and Ohtani, who broke out of a seven-game slump with two walks, a triple and a home run.

Vargas has started only 12 games since he was recalled from triple-A in mid-May but is batting .349 (15 for 43) with a 1.059 on-base-plus-slugging percentage, three homers, four doubles and nine RBIs in 18 games.

“I’ve been patient, working on myself, trying to get this type of opportunity, and I’m grateful to have it and be successful,” Vargas said. “A hundred percent, it’s a hard job to do, but this is a team sport … I have to be ready when the moments come.”

Jason Heyward’s knee injury will open more playing time in left field for Vargas, who also began taking ground balls at third base, a position the Dodgers have struggled to fill since Max Muncy went down with an oblique strain on May 15.

Vargas struggled defensively at second base and hit .195 with a .672 OPS, seven homers and 32 RBIs in 81 games last season before being sent down at the All-Star break.

“He’s gaining more confidence each day and earning more opportunities,” Roberts said. “He had success at triple-A, and I think this second time around, he’s slowed down. There’s more clarity. Everyone wants to be out there, but only nine guys can play. He’s continuing to do his work and is focusing on performing when he gets the opportunity.”

Ohtani was stuck in a seven-game skid in which he hit .207 (six for 29) with a .751 OPS, two homers, three RBIs and 15 strikeouts entering Saturday. This was on the heels of a torrid 10-game stretch in which Ohtani hit .444 (16 for 36) with a 1.757 OPS, eight homers and 17 RBIs in 10 games.

“He’s chasing down — it’s that simple,” Roberts said before the game. “He’s had stretches of two, three, four games where he does that, and then he resets and gets back in his zone.”

Ohtani walked and scored in the first inning, was hit by a pitch in the second, walked in the fourth, tripled to right-center in the sixth and homered off left-hander Bryan Hudson in the eighth.

“Hitting is very difficult, and guys are going to bring their best when they face Shohei,” Roberts said. “But I think for him, simplifying where he’s good in the strike zone, then the natural ability takes over. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Paxton was hardly dominant, giving up two runs and four hits in five innings, striking out three and walking two, relying primarily on a four-seam fastball that averaged just 92.8 mph, down from his season average of 93.3 mph.

But Paxton, who is 7-2 with a 4.24 ERA in 16 starts, did stem the bleeding of a rotation that was rocked for 30 runs in 30 innings of the previous seven games.

“I used to get up to 98 mph, but I don’t really have that in the tank right now,” said Paxton, who had Tommy John surgery in 2021. “The cutter, which was a big strikeout pitch for me, hasn’t been there.

“I came into the season thinking the velocity would come, but it hasn’t come as much as I thought it would. So I think I’m evolving as a pitcher. My stuff isn’t what it used to be, but I’m pitching differently, pitching to weak contact, trying to give us a chance to win.”

Dodgers starting pitcher James Paxton delivers during a 5-3 win over the Milwaukee Brewers at Dodger Stadium on Saturday.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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The Brewers took a 1-0 lead in the first inning when Contreras walked, took second on a Yelich groundout and scored on Adames’ two-out RBI single to left field.

The Dodgers countered with three in the bottom of the first off Milwaukee ace Freddy Peralta, Ohtani leading off with a walk and Will Smith hitting his fourth homer in six plate appearances, a two-run shot that traveled 369 feet to right field.

Smith, who hit three homers and walked twice Friday night, became the first Dodger to homer in four consecutive at-bats since Adrian Gonzalez on April 7-8, 2015, and the first major leaguer to do so since Houston’s Jose Altuve on Sept. 3-5, 2023.

Freddie Freeman singled to left, took third on Teoscar Hernández’s single to center and scored on Andy Pages’ fielder’s-choice grounder for a 3-1 lead. The Brewers pulled to within 3-2 in the fourth on Rhys Hoskins solo homer to left off Paxton.

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A hundred years from now, a tennis nerd will ask the floating hologram next to his ear about the great male players from the early part of the 21st century.

The hologram will wax poetic about a triumvirate of players known as the Big Three: Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, and Rafael Nadal. They ruled the sport before the advent of nuclear-powered strings and 200 miles per hour serves, winning around 70 Grand Slam titles between them. 

Then, almost as an afterthought, it will mention a couple of others who won a few of Earth’s most important tournaments, before the tours expanded to include the exoplanets of Alpha Centauri.

“Stan Wawrinka and Andy Murray won three Grand Slams each and were the next best of the era of The Big Three,” the hologram will say.

Humans of 2124: do not trust your holograms, especially if they mention that in his final Wimbledon competition, likely the penultimate tournament of his career, he had to endure a 21-year-old deciding to blow off a mixed doubles match with him at the last minute. Emma Raducanu, his compatriot who is reviving her nascent career with a run into the second week at Wimbledon, withdrew in order to prioritise her singles chances in an open draw, over a chance to be on court with Murray, her idol, for what figured to be his final match on the Wimbledon grass.

So other than a planned doubles effort at the Olympics, this really is it for Wimbledon, allowing the efforts to secure his proper spot in the tennis lexicon to begin. No disrespect to Wawrinka, an excellent player with a fine career, but Murray didn’t spend the past three decades bucking convention, being the ultimate thorn in the side of so many assumptions about tennis, to have holograms and the tennis nerds that employ them remember him in the same sentence.

Maybe this is what kept Murray going the past year and a half, desperate for one more run to the business end of the grandest events in the sport long after pretty much everyone could see that wasn’t in the stars. Maybe this is why he hobbled onto courts to take on the best players in the world when climbing stairs was becoming a struggle.

In March, Murray stood in a hotel gym with Brad Gilbert, the former pro and longtime coach, in Indian Wells, California, late at 4 am. An early rising insomniac and a jet-lagged Scot jabbering about new racket technology, Murray telling Gilbert that he might have found a new stick that could give him a little extra… something.

Something that could prove that he still had the magic.

Maybe Murray really was sticking around simply because he loved just about everything about his job — the feel of the racket in his hands, the life of a globetrotting superstar, the incomparable highs that the heat of competitions produced. He burned with jealousy watching players like Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz as they started out on their journeys. He would have gone back to the beginning if he could have, not to change anything necessarily, but just because he would have loved to do it all again.    

“I want to play tennis because I, you know, I do enjoy this,” he said last year in Surbiton, where he was playing a Challenger event instead of the French Open to get extra time on the grass ahead of Wimbledon. 

“I love it. It’s not like this is like a massive chore for me.”

Murray and his new Yonex racket in Geneva, earlier in 2024. (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images)

It never really was, even if that’s the way it looked as he growled his way through 1,000 matches. But it was also the joy of playing a game he loved, and proving just about every assumption about him and his sport wrong.

First there was the idea that a Scot could even be any good at junior level tennis. Golf maybe, but not tennis. Too many talented kids from friendlier tennis climates and locales to contend with. There weren’t many indoor courts, and not too many expert coaches other than his mother, Judy, and surely not enough top-tier competition to help him develop, other than his older brother, Jamie. 

Murray wasn’t about to let that get in his way, whether that meant training harder during those first formative years or taking the radical step that few of his peers took.

“My mum did her best to create an environment for not just us two, but the players that were of a sort of performance level, and to get us together as much as we could because she understood how difficult it was,” Jamie Murray said during an interview last year.

“Obviously, Andy left when he was 15 — he went to Spain, he made the decision: ‘I really want to be a tennis player and to do that, I need to go to Spain to train’ and he was obviously very headstrong in that and he went. I stayed at home.” 

Habits form early in tennis. In most cases, a 25-year-old’s forehand won’t look all that different from his 15-year-old version. Same goes for attitudes and approaches, like Murray’s penchant for bucking conventional wisdom.

So Andy, nice junior career, but surely you won’t be able to win much against Federer and Nadal, or even your buddy from juniors, Djokovic. Born at the wrong time. Tough luck. 

He beat Nadal seven times and Federer and Djokovic 11.

Murray and his buddy from Serbia playing doubles together at the 2006 Australian Open. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)

OK Andy, nice that you can get the occasional win against top players, but a British man hasn’t won a Grand Slam in nearly a century. Can’t happen. 

And then he won the U.S. Open in 2012 and Wimbledon in 2013 and 2016, despite more pressure than any player of the modern era has likely ever felt on Centre Court.

And don’t forget about the losses, including five Australian Open finals, only to either Djokovic or Federer, like so many of his losses in the finals or semifinals of big tournaments. 

“I’m playing against guys that are winning these tournaments like 12 times each year in their careers,” he recalled during an interview last year.

And yet he still won 46 tournaments, including 14 Masters 1000 titles, the level just below a Grand Slam, far more than any player of his era other than the Big Three. Not to pick on Wawrinka, but he won 16 titles, just one a Masters 1000. 

Nice, Andy, but the No 1 taking in this era is out of reach.

He got there in 2016, when Nadal and Djokovic were still in their prime and Federer still had another three years of winning Grand Slams and making finals.

It didn’t come easy.

GO DEEPER

Fifty Shades of Andy Murray

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“I basically just did everything, you know,” he recalled. “I would be on the running track. I’d be in the gym, lifting weights, I’d be doing core sessions, I’d be doing hot yoga, I’d be doing sprint work, speed work, just chucking everything at myself.”

He paid a price for that, putting so much stress on his hip that he had to undergo resurfacing surgery in 2019. Doctors told him he’d be lucky to be able to hit tennis balls with his children one day. He turned those words into a challenge to prove them as wrong as he possibly could, rising to 36th in the world last summer. 

He relished being a kind of guinea pig, one of the first top athletes to test the limits of a hip made largely of metal.

Murray’s hip first derailed him, then became one of the symbols of his career. (Ashley Western / CameraSport via Getty Images)

“No one really knows where that limit is,” he said.

“I want to see what that is.”

All of that, though, was just the competitive contrarian in him, which extended to his off-court empathy for subjects and people that the sport can relegate or try to avoid.

Male tennis players have never shown all that much respect for the women’s game. Murray talked it up and hired a female coach, Amelie Mauresmo.

They also rarely speak ill of their fellow players, or support any action that might cause much discomfort to one of them. Murray was among the first to criticize the ATP Tour for dragging its feet for months before announcing it would investigate domestic abuse allegations against Alexander Zverev. The German settled a case involving charges brought by his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child out of court, during the French Open.

Murray bought a condo in Miami and studied the training and business habits of NBA players to see what he could learn from them. When he didn’t like how management companies treated athletes, he opened his own shop. He bought an old deteriorating hotel in Scotland where his family had celebrated weddings and other important moments, even though advisors told him it was a terrible idea. He and his wife, Kim, have turned it into a luxury destination. He collects art.

Murray joins Kim and his team at Wimbledon after winning it, finally, in 2013. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)

 So, of course he was never going to leave the tennis court when everyone else started planning his retirement. Of course he was going to do it his way, trying to wring every last chance he may or may not have had for glory out of his body, and that new Yonex racket he tried earlier this year, which led him to Gilbert in Miami at 4 am.

He would not just acquiesce, even attempting to return from back surgery on a spinal cyst in time for one last singles match on Centre Court that he would likely lose. There is a reason Murray holds the record for coming back from two sets down, overcoming that deficit 11 times, that last one at the 2023 Australian Open, when he played for ​​five hours and 45 minutes and beat Thanasi Kokkinakis 4-6, 6-7 (4), 7-6 (5), 6-3, 7-5 just after that magic time, 4 am.

After some 30 years of going about life and tennis that way, old habits die hard.

Murray knew the end would come eventually.

Taking on conventional wisdom is one thing. Beating time and ageing is an altogether different animal. Murray just had to give it his best fight, which was the easiest part of the hardest thing, because he’s never known any other way. 

(Top photos: Joe Toth/AELTC Pool, Simon Bruty/Anychance / Getty Images; Design: Dan Goldfarb for The Athletic)