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USA Basketball defends decision to leave Caitlin Clark off the 2024 Paris Olympics team
Fans were disappointed earlier this week when Caitlin Clark, the first round overall draft pick for the WNBA, was not on the U.S. women’s basketball team roster for the 2024 Paris Olympics. Now, USA Basketball has responded.
Selection committee chair Jen Rizzotti told the Associated Press it all comes down to the criteria for choosing players. Experience was a factor.
“And when you base your decision on criteria, there were other players that were harder to cut because they checked a lot more boxes,” Rizzotti said. “Then sometimes it comes down to position, style of play for Cheryl [Reeve] and then sometimes a vote.”
Clark, credited with drawing millions of new viewers to both women’s college and professional basketball games this year, said making the Olympic team is a dream and that she now has something to work toward.
“Hopefully one day I can be there,” she told reporters after practice on Sunday. “I think it’s just a little more motivation. You remember that. Hopefully when four years comes back around, I can be there.”
She said she wasn’t disappointed and is excited for the women who made the team.
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The team is a mix of players with individual skill sets, USA Basketball CEO Jim Tooley told the AP.
“We have veterans, newcomers and those in the middle,” he said. “Good perspective and continuity is such an important thing and is why we’ve been successful in the Olympics.”
The Team USA women’s basketball team has won gold at every single Olympics since 1988, except for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics when they took home Bronze.
The six-person selection committee formed a team of players who have already won either an Olympic or World Cup gold medal, according to USA Basketball.
Diana Taurasi, who played in her first Olympics 20 years ago in Athens, returns for her sixth consecutive Olympic Games. Her Phoenix Mercury teammates Brittney Griner and Kahleah Copper join her on Team USA.
Breanna Stewart, Napheesa Collier, Chelsea Gray, Jewell Loyd and A’ja Wilson, who have all played in past Olympics, also made the team. Sabrina Ionescu, Kelsey Plum, Alyssa Thomas and Jackie Young who have all earned Olympic gold or World Cup gold medals for 3×3 games were also selected. Plum and Young will play on the 5×5 team.
Players like Clark and Ariel Atkins, who played at the Tokyo Olympics, and 2022 World Cup team members Shakira Austin, Betnijah Laney-Hamilton and Brionna Jones, could be taken to the Paris Olympics as alternates, according to the AP.
Still, fans were shocked when Clark — who is the all-time NCAA Division I scoring leader and is one of two players in WNBA history to have 150 points, 50 rebounds and 50 assists in their first 10 games — was left off the roster.
“Leaving Catlin Clark of the Woman’s USA @Olympics Team has to be one of the all-time misses in sports history,” one person wrote on social media.
“Caitlin Clark not playing with the Olympic team is going to lose them millions and millions of dollars. Wild. Her international publicity would be outrageous numbers. Very surprising they left her out,” wrote another.
“I don’t follow the WNBA nor do I know any of their names – EXCEPT Catlin Clark. The WNBA missed out on eyes viewing the basketball Olympic Games,” another person posted.
Some social media users, however, pointed out that no WNBA rookies were selected. Clark also did not attend Olympic training camp – which improves players’ chances of making the roster – because she was playing in the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship, CBS Sports reports.
Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves made his professional auto racing debut on Saturday at the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“The Matrix” star, who qualified 31st out of 35 cars, ran as high as 21st before a single-car crash a little more than halfway through the 45-minute race briefly stopped him in his tracks.
Darron Cummings / AP
The 60-year-old spun into the grass without a collision on the exit of Turn 9 when he had about 21 minutes of racing left. He re-entered the course and continued driving, signaling he was uninjured.
Reeves finished 25th.
The actor is competing at Indianapolis in the Toyota GR Cup, a Toyota spec-racing series and a support series for this weekend’s Indy 8 Hour sports car event. He has a second race on Sunday.
Darron Cummings / AP
He is driving the No. 92 BRZRKR car, which is promoting his graphic novel “The Book of Elsewhere.” He is teammates with Cody Jones from “Dude Perfect.”
Reeves has previous racing experience as a former participant in the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach in the celebrity race. Reeves won the event in 2009.
A passenger successfully landed a small plane on Friday after the pilot had a medical emergency, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The twin-engine Beechcraft King Air 90 was traveling from Henderson Executive Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada to Monterey Regional Airport in California, with a pilot and one other person on board, the FAA said.
The pilot suffered an unspecified medical emergency while flying, the FAA said, forcing the passenger to take the controls and make an emergency landing at Meadows Field Airport in Bakersfield, California.
The Kern Fire Department told CBS News affiliate KBAX that firefighters were called to a report of a medical emergency on the plane. The pilot was reported to be “incapacitated,” the fire department said. Firefighters saw the plane approach and land safely, then “chased” the plane down the runway in emergency vehicles to meet it.
The FAA did not release the passenger or pilot’s identities nor give an update on the pilot’s condition. The pilot was taken to an area hospital by ambulance. The passenger did not report any injuries.
The FAA and the National Transportation Security Board will investigate the incident, the FAA said.
Congolese authorities began vaccination against mpox on Saturday, nearly two months after the disease outbreak that spread from Congo to several African countries and beyond was declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization.
The 265,000 doses donated to Congo by the European Union and the U.S. were rolled out in the eastern city of Goma in North Kivu province, where hospitals and health workers have been overstretched, struggling to contain the new and possibly more infectious strain of mpox.
Congo, with about 30,000 suspected mpox cases and 859 deaths, accounts for more than 80% of all the cases and 99% of all the deaths reported in Africa this year. All of the Central African nation’s 26 provinces have recorded mpox cases. Officials in Congo previously told CBS News that they’ve struggled to diagnose patients and provide basic care in the vast country of 100 million people, where a fragile, under-resourced healthcare system is also burdened by the stigma associated with the virus.
Although most mpox infections and deaths recorded in Congo are in children under age 15, the doses being administered are only meant for adults and will be given to at-risk populations and front-line workers, Health Minister Roger Kamba said this week.
“Strategies have been put in place by the services in order to vaccinate all targeted personnel,” Muboyayi ChikayaI, the minister’s chief of staff, said as he kicked off the vaccination.
Moses Sawasawa / AP
At least 3 million doses of the vaccine approved for use in children are expected from Japan in the coming days, Kamba said.
Mpox, also known as monkeypox, had been spreading mostly undetected for years in Africa before the disease prompted the 2022 global outbreak that saw wealthy countries quickly respond with vaccines from their stockpiles while Africa received only a few doses despite pleas from its governments.
However, unlike the global outbreak in 2022 that was overwhelmingly focused on gay and bisexual men, mpox in Africa is now being spread via sexual transmission as well as through close contact among children, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups, Dr. Dimie Ogoina, the chair of WHO’s mpox emergency committee, recently told reporters.
More than 34,000 suspected cases and 866 deaths from the virus have been recorded across 16 countries in Africa this year. That is a 200% increase compared to the same period last year, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
A lack of diagnostic materials and basic medicines to treat the virus, which can improve survival rates, have also hampered efforts to contain the outbreak, and access to vaccines remains a challenge.
Moses Sawasawa / AP
The continent of 1.4 billion people has only secured a commitment for 5.9 million doses of mpox vaccines, expected to be available from October through December, Dr. Jean Kaseya, head of the Africa CDC, told reporters last week. Congo remains a priority, he said.
At the vaccination drive in Goma, Dr Jean Bruno Kibunda, the WHO representative, warned that North Kivu province is at a risk of a major outbreak due to the “promiscuity observed in the camps” for displaced people, as one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis caused by armed violence unfolds there.
The news of the vaccination program brought relief to many in Congo, especially in hospitals that had been struggling to manage the outbreak. Doctors with several charities working in the country have told CBS News they’re overstretched and short on supplies, even having to use tents and mattresses on the floor of makeshift isolation wards to treat a constant influx of patients.
“If everyone could be vaccinated, it would be even better to stop the spread of the disease,” said Dr. Musole Mulambamunva Robert, the medical director of Kavumu Hospital, one of the mpox treatment centers in eastern Congo.
Eastern Congo has been beset by conflict for years, with more than 100 armed groups vying for a foothold in the mineral-rich area near the border with Rwanda. Some have been accused of carrying out mass killings.
