Team USA has dominated the medal count at the Summer Olympics. Will that streak continue in Paris?

Follow our Olympics coverage in the run up to the Paris Games.

If you could step into a time capsule and travel back in time to the corridors of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee at the end of the 20th century, you’d undoubtedly hear a lot of chatter about Asian sporting giants.

“The talk of 1996 was that China was going to overtake (the United States),” says Bill Maron, a world authority on Olympic medal statistics.

The numbers were hard to argue with: China’s population had exceeded one billion, its economy was booming, and its middle class was growing burgeoning.

The government was determined to invest in Chinese excellence in nearly every aspect of society, but especially in sports, because there were few more dramatic ways to demonstrate international superiority than winning the world’s premier international sporting event. The government built sports schools and academies. Chinese sports officials searched the countryside for athletic kids and channeled them into specific sports and specializations. Winning it in the long term was like damming the ocean.

Until, of course, it is.

“We realized there was a limit to how many medals we could win in diving and table tennis,” Maron said.

What has happened instead is an era of international sports dominance unparalleled in the 130-year history of the modern Olympics, which began in 1896. Since 1996, the United States has won the most gold and all-around medals at every Summer Olympic Games, with one exception.

At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China’s sports machine did as everyone expected, winning 48 gold medals, more than any other country, including the United States, which won 36. Swimming’s GOAT, Michael Phelps, won eight of them, either alone or as part of a relay team. Still, the U.S. won the overall medal race that year, winning 112 medals to China’s 100.

But after this brief misstep, the U.S. has returned to nearly dominating the rest of the world, except for China, who came close to matching the U.S. in gold medals at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. Title IX, the landmark 1972 civil rights law that opened up countless opportunities for women to participate in sports at school and college, helped in large part. Women accounted for more than 60% of the U.S. medals at the Tokyo Olympics.

The question now is how long this dominance can last as the success formula for swimming and track and field, the country’s two biggest summer sports and the top Olympic events in terms of medals, is changing. For much of that dominance, it has been helped by the presence of multi-sport stars in swimming like Phelps and Katie Ledecky, and to a lesser extent in track and field, as well as a pretty good gymnast in Simone Biles.

Biles remains dominant, and Ledecky remains formidable, but the U.S. will go into Paris without one or two athletes who are all but guaranteed to win a chestful of medals. Maintaining its dominance will require a broader approach and victories in less-watched sports.

You may not have heard of Eli Dershwitz, a 28-year-old fencer from Massachusetts who won the men’s sabre world championship last year and may very well become the first American man to win a gold medal in fencing since 1904.

“I try to get the expectations out of my mind,” Dershwitz said recently.

The U.S. also became the first team in the Tokyo Olympics to fail to win a medal in rowing.

And after receiving much criticism from athletes who felt U.S. Olympic leaders were placing too much emphasis on winning at the expense of their mental health, officials shifted their measures of success away from an obsession with medal scoreboards.

This means tallying not just the number of gold and overall medals, but also the number of individuals who win medals, meaning a medal in a swimming or athletics relay would count as four instead of one, and if women’s football wins a medal, its tally would be 18.

Additionally, USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland said the organization wants to closely monitor which athletes can perform better than ever before in this tournament.

“You think about the number of people that are going to be impacted,” Hirshland said. “A relatively small number of athletes will win medals, but many athletes are looking to achieve their personal bests, and the rules are designed to measure their full potential.”

The organization does so for two reasons: They want to make sure they reward athletes who excel under the brightest spotlight, and they understand that these Olympics are, in some ways, a step toward the biggest event on the calendar, the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Personal bests in Paris could help athletes and their sport’s national governing bodies receive additional funding over the next four years.

“Americans love winners,” Rocky Harris, the USOPC’s director of sport and athlete services, said earlier this year. “We want Los Angeles to be successful.”

U.S. fencer Eli Dershwitz has won the men’s sabre at the 2023 World Championships. He is one of the U.S. team’s favorites to win a medal outside of high-profile sports. (Pia Marco Tacca/Getty Images)

More than any other Olympic official besides Hirshland, Harris is responsible for figuring out where the organization should put its resources. As associate athletic director at Arizona State University and later in a similar role at USA Triathlon, he helped make the U.S. a powerhouse in the Olympic distance.

USA Triathlon excels at finding talented collegiate runners and swimmers with experience in other sports and helping them master a third sport. The latest example is Morgan Pearson, a runner at the University of Colorado. He swam in high school and over the past decade has learned how to cycle well enough to compete. Pearson is one of the favorites to win gold in Paris.

Like all U.S. Olympic officials, Harris knows that swimming and track and field are the pillars of America’s Olympic success. At last year’s world track and field championships, the U.S. won 29 medals, including 12 gold medals, far more than any other country. In swimming, the newly threatened Australian team won more gold medals, but the U.S. is set to dominate the medal total at the 2023 world championships.

But Harris has his eye on fencer Dershwitz and some of his teammates. Like most athletes, he’d be a bit shocked if the women’s rowing eight doesn’t get back on the podium. He also thinks some of the U.S. sailors have medal shots.

The U.S. also generally does well when new sports are introduced at the Olympics, because its size and wealth mean it has the talent to do pretty much everything. Sport climbing, skateboarding and surfing all debuted in Tokyo; the U.S. made the podium in each one; those sports also return this year. New in Paris is breaking, with America’s Victor Montalvo winning the 2023 men’s world championship.

There may be another reason why the U.S. has an advantage in Paris this summer: Organizers chose not to install central air conditioning in the Olympic Village, citing sustainability and a design goal to keep the athletes’ living quarters cool. But Paris gets pretty hot in the summer, and that heat can make it hard to sleep.

After American athletes complained to USOPC representatives about the issue, Hirshland approved bringing air conditioning for the team at her organization’s expense. She wants to make sure the team is comfortable, well-rested, and has as many home comforts as possible. That might mean a few hot, sleepless nights during competitions, so be it.

“Consistency and predictability are crucial to U.S. team performance,” Hirshland said.

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(Top photo: Noah Lyles celebrates winning the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic Trials. Patrick Smith/Getty Images)