When Simone Manuel touched the wall to clinch a gold medal on Saturday night, it was a moment 120 years in the making.
The US women’s 4x100m medley relay team of Kathleen Baker, Lilly King, Dana Vollmer and Manuel — winners at the Rio Games on Saturday night — is being recognized by the US Olympic Committee (USOC) as delivering the nation’s 1,000th gold medal in Summer Olympics history.
By their count, anyway. Keeping count of the gold total is not as exact a science as one might think.
The count accepted by the USOC coming into the Rio Games was 977 gold medals, and even that was adjusted a bit in recent weeks over a debated medal from the 1904 St Louis Games. That means the gold medal in the women’s eights on Saturday morning was the 21st for the US in Rio, and No. 998 overall.
Some sites say there are a few more, some say a bit less. The USOC count is the accepted one.
And the relay win was No. 23 in Rio, so by the USOC’s count, that made it official.
“A gold medal is like a newborn baby,” said long jumper Jeff Henderson, who put the US on the brink with gold No. 999 earlier on Saturday night. “It’s just lovely.”
Lovely, 1,000 times over now for the US.
“A remarkable achievement made possible by the culture of sport that is the fabric and foundation of Team USA,” USOC CEO Scott Blackmun said on Saturday night.
James Connolly won the first gold for the US in 1896, and no one has added more than Michael Phelps, a 23-time gold medalist.
Illustrating how not-so-simple this medal-counting business is, the official info portal for the Rio Games even has a different number than the USOC, saying the one the US will recognize as No. 1,000 is really No. 1,001.
Whatever the real number, the US is the first to reach four figures — in a landslide. The Soviet Union remains No. 2 on the all-time summer gold list, and no other nation has even reached 500.
“Here’s the significance: The next four best nations had 1,004 gold medals coming into Rio,” said Bill Mallon, an Olympic historian. “You add up the next four and they barely have more than we do.”
At its current rate, China would not reach 1,000 golds until 2100. Germany would not get there until 2204.
However, there have been some very interesting story lines on the US road to 1,000.
If Rick DeMont had his way, gold medal No. 1,000 would really be identified as gold medal No. 1,001.
Or maybe even No. 1,002.
DeMont was 16 when he won gold in the 400m freestyle at the Munich Games in 1972. However, he tested positive for ephedrine, which was part of his asthma medication, and stripped of the medal days later along with a chance to compete in a 1,500m event.
DeMont tried for decades to get the medal back, saying he was wronged because the USOC did not properly disclose to Olympic officials that he was on medication — and that if they had done so, his ephedrine level would not have led to his ban.
In 2001, the USOC recognized DeMont for his achievements and said it was bringing him “back into the Olympic family.”
However, the International Olympic Committee later that year declined to consider restoring DeMont’s gold over the USOC paperwork mix-up. So the gold remains awarded to Bradford Cooper of Australia. Cooper now owns a swimming school in his homeland, while DeMont is the swimming coach at the University of Arizona.
“It was so long ago that it almost seems like it happened to another person in another life,” DeMont said on Saturday. “I don’t carry it with me.”
No matter how well the US does in Rio, the medal count this year will not come close to the St Louis Games in 1904.
Officially, here is the count from that Olympics for the US: 79 golds — it had been 78 until recently, when one medal that was counted as being won by a mixed-nationality team was added to the US total, because five of the six members were Americans, along with one Austrian — 78 silver and 79 bronze; 236 medals in all.
Germany was second in the medals standings with 13.
About half of the official competitions in those Games only had US entrants, and some historians have suggested that even some of the athletes who are listed as part of the US team likely were newly arrived immigrants who either had not become citizens yet or never actually completed that process.
Held in Athens, the 1906 Games were considered as an Olympics at the time, but are now not recognized by the IOC, so the medal counts do not appear on official lists. Unlike the St Louis Games two year earlier, these Games had more of a normal Olympic program.
There were 78 events and medals were awarded; there was even a true opening ceremony. The US was second to France in the medal standings, winning 12 golds to France’s 15.
So while little debates and differing counts will likely continue, the US dominance is not in question. And maybe it was fitting that Phelps, the most decorated Olympian ever with 28 medals, helped start the march toward the next milestone on Saturday night, when the final swim of his career — part of a win in a relay — delivered gold No. 1,001.
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