You can love Caitlin Clark. You can hate Caitlin Clark. You can love her Iowa roots. You can hate her Iowa roots. You can like her because she’s white, or dislike her because she’s white. Same goes for being straight. You can love the media’s fascination with her, or hate it. You can love the historic TV ratings and sell-out crowds, or hate them. You can love her interviews, or hate them.
But there’s one thing that we all know to be true:
With Caitlin Clark on the 2024 U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team, players who have been largely ignored by the sports media at every Summer Olympic Games that I’ve covered, which is every one since 1984, would have finally received the spotlight they deserve from a national and global audience
Leaving Caitlin Clark off Olympic team, USA Basketball airballs on huge opportunity
Christine Brennan
USA TODAY
You can love Caitlin Clark. You can hate Caitlin Clark. You can love her Iowa roots. You can hate her Iowa roots. You can like her because she’s white, or dislike her because she’s white. Same goes for being straight. You can love the media’s fascination with her, or hate it. You can love the historic TV ratings and sell-out crowds, or hate them. You can love her interviews, or hate them.
But there’s one thing that we all know to be true:
With Caitlin Clark on the 2024 U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team, players who have been largely ignored by the sports media at every Summer Olympic Games that I’ve covered, which is every one since 1984, would have finally received the spotlight they deserve from a national and global audience.
Going into the Games, with national sensation Clark on the roster, I think the top storylines for the Americans in Paris (and quite a few international reporters) would have been these: 1. Simone Biles, 2. Katie Ledecky 3. Caitlin Clark.
Maybe you add an athlete or team or two here or there, U.S. women’s soccer, U.S. men’s basketball, take your pick, but that’s the general idea. With Clark continuing to set records for TV ratings and attendance in her first eye-popping month in the WNBA as she did in NCAA basketball, it would have been inevitable: she would catapult U.S. women’s basketball to a place it so richly has deserved but has never attained — coverage from broadcasters and news organizations not just in the U.S. but around the world, headlines every day, and most important, vastly increased respect from a still male-dominated international sports media that has for decades focused almost exclusively on the U.S. men’s basketball team rather than the women, who are so good they haven’t lost since 1992.
