LYON, France — On Day 12 of the Olympic soccer slog, in City No. 4, ahead of Victory No. 5, U.S. women’s national team head coach Emma Hayes dug deep into her bag of eccentric tricks for a lesson on “pain caves.”
She convened the USWNT two days after a 120-minute quarterfinal grind, and one day before a semifinal. She knew her players were sore, weary, drained.
So she queued up a video that had nothing to do with soccer. She introduced them to Courtney Dauwalter, an ultramarathoner. She did this because their semifinal against Germany, like an ultramarathon, would not be about tactics or even about physical superiority.