With jolt of joy, revamped U.S. women’s soccer beats Brazil for Olympic gold
PARIS — U.S. Soccer has been searching for a name for the dynamic trio of young forwards leading its women’s national team. Saturday it found one.
Olympic champions.
With Mallory Swanson, the eldest of that terrific 20-something trio, scoring the game’s only goal 13 minutes into the second half, the U.S. beat Brazil 1-0 in the gold-medal final of the Paris Games, giving the Americans their first Olympic title in 12 years and a record fifth championship in eight tries.
“It’s just crazy,” Swanson said. “I don’t think it’s soaked in yet.
“You always say you want to win a gold medal. You never know when it’s going to happen, how it’s going to happen, you don’t know if it’s gonna happen.
“I’m just so thankful that I was able to do it with this.”
The U.S. got a huge assist from new coach Emma Hayes, who has changed the tone within a program that is showing a youthful verve and joy again.
The previous time the U.S. won gold in soccer, the country didn’t have a first-tier professional women’s league and Hayes had just taken over as coach at Chelsea in England. On Saturday, wearing an American Eagle pendant her late father had given her, Hayes looked up into the stands at Parc des Princes stadium and saw her mother sitting next to Tom Cruise.
At the final whistle, she reached down and kissed the pendant hanging around her neck.
“I wouldn’t be here without him,” Hayes said of her father, Sid, who urged her to apply for the vacant U.S. job last September, just before he died. A month later she kept her promise to him and accepted it.
“America means like more to me than most people realize,” said Hayes, who got her first professional coaching job in the U.S. when she was 25. “I’d come from a pretty stuffy society that didn’t embrace the women’s game and women in football. And I went to America and they looked after me and they nurtured me and they opened the doors to me and they gave me opportunities that England never, ever gave me. I’m just so happy to repay that faith in me.”
Because of her contract with Chelsea, Hayes wasn’t able to hold her first practice with the national team until June 1. Seventy-one days later, that team is the Olympic champion.
“The minute I got the job,” Hayes answered when asked when she knew that was possible. “I knew the players. I knew the capabilities amongst them.”
However, captain Lindsey Horan said the credit goes to Hayes and her coaches, who provided the missing ingredients.
“We felt the trust, we felt the confidence, we felt the belief from them,” she said. “And I think that’s what made this happen.”
“We’re all playing with joy,” Swanson added. “We’re having so much fun.”
So is Hayes.
“I’ve had a blast this past month,” she said with an expletive. “I had a ball. I felt at times like I was at university. I felt lighter than I felt in a long time.”
That hasn’t been true of past national teams, which played with a swagger but not a smile. This team has both, with the young forward line of Swanson, 26, Trinity Rodman, 22, and Sophia Smith, who turned 24 on Saturday, combining for 10 of the 12 goals in the Olympic tournament, more than any other team scored.
The three never had started a game together before Hayes arrived last spring.
The goal of the game came from Swanson, but midfielder Korbin Albert made it happen. After a sloppy Brazilian giveaway in the U.S. end, Albert latched on to the loose ball and sent a pass forward for Swanson, who timed her run perfectly, staying onside by the tightest of margins. The forward, playing in her 100th international game, then dribbled into the box and shimmied a couple of times in an effort to distract Brazilian goalkeeper Lorena before putting a right-footed shot into the back of the net for her team-leading fourth goal of the tournament.
Goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher then did the rest, making four saves — including a sterling stop on an Adriana header in second-half stoppage time — to record her third straight shutout in the knockout round and win her first Olympic gold medal, the only prize that had eluded her in a 10-year international career. Naeher gave up just one goal during her last 488 minutes in France.
Afterward Naeher — at 36, the oldest player in the youngest starting lineup the U.S. used in an Olympic final this century — had her own praise for Hayes, who is unbeaten in 10 games with the team.
“We feel that belief from her, and I think she’s just encouraged everybody to bring their special, unique abilities, however that fits in with the team,” Naeher said. “Obviously we have a team identity, but [she’s] also allowing people to be individuals.”
For Brazil and the legendary Marta, a six-time world player of the year who was playing in her final world championship tournament, Saturday’s result marked the third time they lost to the U.S. by a goal in an Olympic final.
“It was a very emotional moment,” said Marta, 38, who got a roar from the appreciative crowd when she accepted her third silver medal. “I played my first Olympics when I was 18. Now I’m surrounded by players that are very young, and I hope all the fighting and all the struggling I went through since I started helped pave the way for them.
“I left my family behind when I was 14 to chase the dream of playing football, a sport that hasn’t always been considered to be for women. Today things are very different, and we can say it’s one of the most popular sports, and it keeps growing. I can’t feel anything but pride at the moment.”
The same could be said of Hayes.
“This, of course, professionally, is probably much bigger than anything else I’ve ever done,” she said. And, she added, “my mom had ‘Mission Impossible’ today.”
Go beyond the scoreboard
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