The history is stark: No reigning Women’s World Cup champion has ever gone on to win the Olympic gold medal a year later. That was the challenge facing the U.S. women’s national team in 2016 after raising the World Cup trophy a year earlier. But there’s a reason why no women’s team has done the double, as Megan Rapinoe argued: Everything that goes into winning a World Cup—and the publicity deluge that follows—makes it really, really hard.
And so it went for the USWNT, which fell to Sweden on penalty kicks in the Olympic quarterfinals and failed to reach the semifinals of an Olympics or World Cup for the first time in the team’s storied history.