The 2020 Olympics officially got underway on Saturday with the first 11 of 339 gold medals, plus their silver and bronze siblings, meeting their new owners in Tokyo.
For the first time in nearly a half-century of the Summer Olympics, none of those new owners were American. According to Olympic historian Bill Mallon, it was the first medal-less Day 1 for the United States since Munich in 1972.
While a medal-less Day 1 isn’t infrequent in the Winter Olympics for the U.S. — the same thing happened in 2018 at Pyeongchang — the only other time the United States didn’t have a medal by the end of the first day of a Summer Olympics was when it boycotted the 1980 Games.
Why didn’t Team USA medal in Day 1?
Saturday’s drought covered the following 11 events in seven different sports:
Mixed team archery
Men’s road race cycling
Women’s epee fencing
Men’s saber fencing
Women’s 48kg judo
Men’s 60kg judo
Women’s 10m air rifle shooting
Men’s 10m air pistol shooting
Men’s 58kg taekwondo
Women’s 49kg taekwondo
Women’s 49kg weightlifting
None of those sports are ones that typically power the U.S. medal count, like swimming, track and field, gymnastics and basketball. There wasn’t even an American entered in the judo and taekwondo events.
The only events in which the U.S. seemed to have a reasonable shot at a medal going in were men’s saber and women’s 10m air rifle. Eli Dershwitz is ranked No. 2 in the world in saber, but fell to three-time world champion and 2016 bronze medalist Junghwan Kim. Mary Tucker was the Associated Press’ pick to win gold in the rifle event, but finished sixth while the first gold medal of the competition instead went to China’s Qian Yang.
The closest Team USA got to a Day 1 medal might have been the cycling road race, where Brandon McNulty unexpectedly sat in second place late in the race, but quickly faded for a sixth-place finish.
If you want to take the Day 1 drought as an omen, the 1972 U.S. Olympic team eventually posted 33 gold medals and 94 total medals, both marks finishing second to the Soviet Union. The U.S. would finish behind the Soviets in the next two Summer Olympics as well.
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