U.S. Olympic Dynasty Gets an Early Dunking

Among the ruins you could have spotted Sunday while sightseeing around Athens:

The Temple of Athena Nike.

The Basketball Gods Sleepwalking in Reeboks.

The Fallen Swim Dynasty Wearing Speedo and Nike.

For decades, you could set your Olympic sundial by the movement of the U.S. men’s basketball and 400-meter freestyle relay swim teams. If they were in it, they would win it.

Before Sunday, the U.S. men’s basketball team was 108-2 in Olympic competition, 24-0 since they began recruiting NBA All-Stars to avenge defeat No. 2 in the 1988 Seoul Summer Games.

Before Sunday, the U.S. men’s 400-meter relay team had been 7-1 in championship finals. The only hiccup? A second-place finish in Sydney, to Australia, which had both home-pool advantage and Ian Thorpe, by less than one-fifth of a second.

Before Sunday, there was nothing to be greatly embarrassed about, nothing really to apologize for.

Then came this basketball result from the Helliniko Indoor Arena:

Puerto Rico 92, United States 73.

Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady, Kevin Garnett, Vince Carter, Kenyon Martin, Ray Allen, Mike Bibby, Elton Brand, Ben Wallace and Rip Hamilton, this one’s for you.

Those were some of the NBA stars who might have been able to prevent this debacle. But, for a variety of reasons -- including security concerns, wedding arrangements and, who knows, fear of feta? -- they all decided to stay home and turn the dirty work over to rookies LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Dwyane Wade.

Athens in August, that has to be some sort of hazing ritual, right?

And Puerto Rico?

You could send the Clippers over there and beat Puerto Rico.

You could send the guys the Lakers got in the Shaq and Payton trades over there and beat Puerto Rico.

In fact, this same collection of NBA players -- minus Allen Iverson, James and Amare Stoudemire, who were benched for arriving late to a team meeting -- beat Puerto Rico by 25 points in an exhibition game barely two weeks ago.

Coach Larry Brown, who proved he could do the impossible by leading the Detroit Pistons to the NBA title, now has done it twice. You can almost hear Iverson yapping at him now, “Puerto Rico? We’re talking about Puerto Rico.”

News of imminent American disgrace travels fast in Athens. As writers prepared for the big USA-Australia relay showdown at the Aquatic Center, word that Puerto Rico was leading the U.S. by 22 at the half sent a buzz throughout the media tribune.

Wow, bad night for the Americans.

And, it was only beginning.

Within minutes, the once-invincible U.S. relay team was falling into the pool and tumbling into the tank.

Ian Crocker, the man assigned to kick-start the Americans’ victory charge, swam the first 100 meters in 50.05 seconds. How slow is 50.05 seconds? Of the 32 men who swam 100-meter legs in the race, 31 broke 50 seconds.

“If somebody had told me Ian Crocker would go that slow, I wouldn’t have believed it, “ U.S. Coach Eddie Reese said. “He can’t go that slow.”

Crocker touched the wall in eighth place. It took Michael Phelps and Neil Walker churning hard through a heavy wake to pull the Americans back into third. Anchor man Jason Lezak briefly got the U.S. into the second position, but he couldn’t hold off Dutch sprint master Pieter van den Hoogenband down the stretch and the Americans finished third, another Olympic first for them, behind South Africa and the Netherlands.

How could this happen?

Well, for one thing, Crocker was sick. Reese divulged after the race that Crocker had been bothered by “a scratchy throat” for three days. A pre-final dose of antibiotics was considered, but the idea was scrapped because, Reese said, antibiotics can sometimes adversely affect a swimmer’s performance.

Meanwhile, Gary Hall Jr., anchor on the gold- and silver-medal-winning teams of 1996 and 2000, rode the bench. Ready, willing and seasoned, Hall seemed the man for the job.

Yet Reese opted to swim a sick Crocker instead of a healthy Hall because Hall had swum 48.7 seconds in a Sunday morning preliminary heat. Reese was hoping for something closer to 48.2.

“I’ve always been pretty much a math-oriented person,” Reese said.

Never mind Hall’s big-race reputation; Reese wanted to see numbers.

That was one difference between the two U.S. coaches Sunday. Reese had alternatives Brown couldn’t fathom.

Reese actually had a gold-medal winner, a three-time Olympian, in Athens, and kept him in reserve.

And may have cost Phelps $1 million, the prize money he stands to earn should he win seven gold medals here, with that decision.

Where do the erstwhile American Olympic dynasties go from here?

Option A: Brown immediately quits as U.S. coach and signs with Puerto Rico.

Option B: Statehood for Puerto Rico!

Option C was uttered by Reese and it sounds like something Brown might want to adopt.

Asked what he planned to say to his team to get it back on track, Reese smiled thinly and said, “Don’t do that again.”