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COVID-Hit Lyles Misses Out on a Double, US Team Breaks 100-Medal Mark

Botswana's Letsile Tebogo (2ndL) crosses the finish line ahead of US' Noah Lyles (R) to win the men's 200m final of the athletics event at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at Stade de France in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, on August 8, 2024. (AFP)
Botswana's Letsile Tebogo (2ndL) crosses the finish line ahead of US' Noah Lyles (R) to win the men's 200m final of the athletics event at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at Stade de France in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, on August 8, 2024. (AFP)
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COVID-Hit Lyles Misses Out on a Double, US Team Breaks 100-Medal Mark

Botswana's Letsile Tebogo (2ndL) crosses the finish line ahead of US' Noah Lyles (R) to win the men's 200m final of the athletics event at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at Stade de France in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, on August 8, 2024. (AFP)
Botswana's Letsile Tebogo (2ndL) crosses the finish line ahead of US' Noah Lyles (R) to win the men's 200m final of the athletics event at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at Stade de France in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, on August 8, 2024. (AFP)

Sprinter Noah Lyles revealed he had COVID-19 after missing out on another gold medal for the United States at the Paris Olympics on Thursday.

Elsewhere, French basketball star Victor Wembanyama moved closer to his dream of a first gold after helping Les Bleus beat Germany to set up a dream final against the US team after the Americans edged Serbia 95-91.

On the same Stade de France track where he won the historically close 100 meters by five thousandths of a second, Lyles was third behind gold medalist Letsile Tebogo of Botswana and US teammate Kenneth Bednarek.

Medics tended to a tired-looking Lyles and took him off in a wheelchair. Wearing a mask as he spoke with reporters, Lyles later said he had COVID.

“It definitely affected my performance,” said Lyles, adding that he tested positive early Tuesday morning but was cleared to compete. The US track federation said it and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee adhered to all Olympic and Centers for Disease Control guidelines.

Over at Bercy Arena, with former NBA stars Dirk Nowitzki and Tony Parker watching their respective countrymen, France held on to win 73-69.

Wembanyama, the NBA rookie of the year, clenched his fists at the buzzer and teammate Evan Fournier jubilantly threw the ball into the crowd.

The 20-year-old star didn't play three years ago in Tokyo, when the French lost the final to the US. They meet again Saturday, when Wembanyama hopes to give France its first Olympic gold in men's or women's basketball.

Highlights of what happened on Day 13 of the Paris Olympics:

Curry leads semifinal fightback against Serbia

LeBron James had a triple double and Steph Curry scored 36 points as the American men rallied from 17 points down.

The US faced an 11-point halftime deficit — the biggest successfully overcome by an American team since NBA players were added to the Olympic mix in 1992 — and again trailed the Serbs by 11 with just over seven minutes left.

Serbian players fell on their backs at the buzzer after coming so close.

It was a far cry from their group opener when the US rolled to a 110-84 win.

US team gets a world record, breaks the 100-medal mark

The United States now has more golds and more overall medals than any other nation.

With three days left of competition, American athletes total 30 golds for 103 medals overall.

The US went 1-2 in the women's 400 hurdles with Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone breaking her own world record in a time of 50.37 seconds, and Anna Cockrell taking the silver.

Grant Holloway followed up with gold in the men's 110 hurdles in 12.99, beating countryman Daniel Roberts.

Also, Long jumper Tara Davis-Woodhall won the women's long jump with Jasmine Moore taking the bronze behind Germany's Malaika Mihambo.

China’s diving double ends with tears

China claimed its sixth gold medal in diving at the Paris Games with defending champion Xie Siyi winning the 3-meter springboard.

The Chinese made it a podium 1-2 as Wang Zongyuan took the silver ahead of Mexico’s Osmar Olvera Ibarra.

Wang was in tears afterward.

He hadn’t lost a major diving competition in the event since finishing behind teammate Xie at the Tokyo Olympics. After that silver, Wang won three straight world championship titles.

“It is regrettable I lost,” Wang said through an interpreter. “I must learn to accept any failure and my response is to make a greater effort to improve myself.”

Another world record but no gold

American Sam Watson left the Games with another world record to his name but didn't get the gold medal.

The 18-year-old Watson broke sport climbing's speed world record on Thursday for the second time at the Paris Games, but that came in the fight for bronze.

Veddriq Leonardo of Indonesia won gold in 4.75 seconds in the final.

Charron lifts for another medal Maude Charron raised Canada's flag at the opening ceremony for the Paris Games and lifted up another medal in weightlifting.

Charron took the silver medal in the 59-kilogram category to add to her gold in the 64-kilogram competition at the Tokyo Games.

Rahimi stars as Morocco gets bronze

Football-mad Morocco fans finally have an Olympic medal to celebrate after routing African rival Egypt 6-0 for the bronze.

Soufiane Rahimi scored twice and the Casablanca-born striker will surely become a household name back home after netting an impressive eight goals in the tournament.

He was comfortably the leading scorer ahead of Friday's final between Spain and 1984 Olympic champion France.

Morocco won the African Cup of Nations title in 1976.

Dutch end long wait for gold in men's field hockey

Duco Telgenkamp scored the golden goal in the shootout to give the Netherlands a 2-1 victory over Germany.

It was the Netherlands’ first gold in men’s hockey at the Olympics since 2000 and third in the country’s history.

Captain Harmanpreet Singh scored both goals as India beat Spain 2-1 for a second straight bronze, after beating Germany at the Tokyo Games.

French get gold, Portugal a rare medal

Track cyclist Benjamin Thomas overcame a crash in the men's omnium race to give France its 14th gold medal of the Paris Games.

Thomas held off Iúri Leitão, whose silver medal was only Portugal's second medal so far — compared to 54 for the French.

Also, world champion Ellesse Andrews of New Zealand won the Olympic title in the women’s keirin.

Nadeem gets Pakistan's first medal with an Olympic record

Arshad Nadeem got Pakistan's first medal of the Paris Games in style by setting an Olympic record in javelin.

Nadeem's throw of 92.97 meters beat Norwegian Andreas Thorkildsen's mark of 90.57 from the 2008 Games in Beijing.

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Scott Parker Suffers the Yo-yo Curse of British Manager at Next Stop Burnley

Scott Parker – on another promotion mission – takes over a Burnley side with one of the stronger squads in the Championship. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images
Scott Parker – on another promotion mission – takes over a Burnley side with one of the stronger squads in the Championship. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images
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Scott Parker Suffers the Yo-yo Curse of British Manager at Next Stop Burnley

Scott Parker – on another promotion mission – takes over a Burnley side with one of the stronger squads in the Championship. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images
Scott Parker – on another promotion mission – takes over a Burnley side with one of the stronger squads in the Championship. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images

The pattern is familiar. The promising young manager gets his chance with a Championship club. He leads them to promotion. He talks a good game of pressing and position, shape and transition, passing and control. And then the financial reality of the Premier League strikes. The manager is reluctant to adapt his philosophy, perhaps doesn’t know how to; that is his style, the way he will make it to the top.

They perhaps achieve a couple of notable results. Maybe, people think, this young manager is the real deal. But they play against an elite side and lose. The cumulative effect of playing against high-class opponents every week takes its toll. The players who swaggered through the Championship become error-prone and, in the Premier League, those mistakes are punished. Confidence dwindles. Form deteriorates. Results go against them. There is a cycle of decline.

The manager, realising his attempts to play out from the back, to dominate the ball, are leading to possession being squandered in dangerous areas, changes approach. He goes more direct. His squad isn’t really set up to play like that. Results don’t improve. Relegation follows. Perhaps the manager is sacked; his time in the Premier League is over. At some point he will be given the chance with another Championship club. Sisyphus goes again.

Into which role steps Scott Parker. His feels like almost the archetypal English managerial career. He is personable and articulate, albeit speaking almost entirely in soporific modern manager babble that pours from his mouth like a mountain stream, sweeping training cones, flip charts and columns of data down into the valley.

He looks like a manager, sounds like a manager. Even as a player he gave the impression of command, of knowing what was going on. It should work.

Parker replaced Claudio Ranieri at Craven Cottage at the end of February 2019 with Fulham second bottom of the table, 10 points from safety. Few managers get a job, especially not a first job, in auspicious circumstances. They did win three of those remaining games but lost the rest, and went down: the first relegation on his record.

Fulham were promoted the following season but didn’t win in the Premier League until November: his second relegation. The cycle turned again: he left the club that summer.

Appointed manager of Bournemouth, he led them to automatic promotion, two points behind Fulham.

They beat Aston Villa on the first day of the following season, 2022-23, but conceded 16 without reply in successive league games against Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool. Parker spoke of the squad being “unequipped” for the Premier League. Three days later, he left the club.

Scott Parker lasted 67 days at Club Brugge.

To an extent, he was done by the calendar, which served up a brutal start. But Parker was also the victim of experience; he knew how hard it is to keep going week after week against better-resourced, compromising principles to try to scrape a few points.

His fault was to acknowledge that in public: the job of a manager is to a large degree a confidence trick, to instil in the players a sense of their own greatness so they achieve heights in excess of their ability.

His appeal to realism was not helped when Gary O’Neil took over and hauled Bournemouth to 15th – not that that was enough for O’Neil to keep the job; he too had to find another struggling club and start again. But that’s how it tends to be.

It’s very hard to break into the top half of the Premier League, so few British managers have that experience and clubs with aspirations to be in the top half tend not to appoint them, preferring those who have shown promise in arguably less taxing leagues abroad.

There is an obvious solution for British managers: go abroad. Parker did that, joining the Belgian champions Club Brugge in December 2022.

He lasted 67 days, winning just two of 12 games. The Dutch winger Noa Lang, one of Brugge’s stars, did seem to enjoy how Parker worked, and a congested fixture list meant there was little time to instil his ideas, but equally Parker never seemed to have a grasp of the league, tweaked the team constantly, played players out of position and seemed to resent the chief executive’s well-known desire to be involved in tactics and team selection.
To an extent that period in Belgium can be ignored. It is relatively common for perfectly decent managers go to a new country and fail to fit in, but those 67 days may make other foreign clubs less likely to employ him. And so Parker is back pushing his boulder up the Championship again, this time with Burnley.

Like Fulham and Bournemouth, they are a mezzanine club, seemingly too good for the Championship but never comfortable in the Premier League.

Burnley themselves are perhaps slightly stung that, having remained loyal to Vincent Kompany as they slid to relegation, he became a target for Bayern Munich, an offer that couldn’t be refused. It is probably significant that Parker has been named as head coach rather than manager, as Kompany was, indicating both that his role will be less wide-ranging than the Belgian’s and that the club is keen to establish a framework based on principles rather than the identity of an individual manager.

The retention of Kompany’s first-team coach, Mike Jackson, and the appointment of the assistant coach Henrik Jensen, which was planned before Kompany’s departure, are part of the process of establishing a structure around the head coach.

Five players have left and more outgoings are probable, but Burnley should still have one of the stronger squads in the division, which is why they are second favourites behind Leeds for promotion.

Parker is used to that: every time he’s taken over a club in the Championship, it’s been one that has recently suffered relegation, still receiving parachute payments. Promotion has always been expected.

Just as the tendency is to sympathise when a manager takes one of the mezzanine clubs down, so there must be a degree of scepticism when he takes one of them up. And that is the curse of the English manager.

What he achieved at Fulham and Bournemouth demonstrates Parker is not a bad manager. It’s far harder to say if he’s actually good or whether he’s just riding the yo-yo.

The Guardian Sport