Team USA rower Kent Smack shows off flags he gathered
from other athletes Sunday during the closing ceremony of the Athens
2004 Olympics. (Gannett News Service, Robert Scheer) | More
photos
5:40 pm | August 29, 2004 | Aristotle would have been proud ... the Greeks pulled it off. They can take a rightful bow, and would probably appreciate an apology.
The Summer Games belong here, in the Olympic cradle, and just one pilgrimage to Ancient Olympia would tell you that. Zeus doesn't play Paris or Moscow, London or Times Square. This is the gods' homecourt. It shouldn't go abandoned for the next 108 years.
The verbal fracas after the U.S. men's basketball team's victory over Spain further illustrates how a once-mighty basketball power has gone from beloved to hated.
On a day that was Olympic in scope both for its shock value and its intrinsic weirdness, the American delegation had what can only be described as a really lousy 24 hours.
9:32 pm | August 29, 2004 | With a national record 63 medals, 32 of them gold, China's athletes showed in Athens they are primed to pump up host-country passions four years from now with a serious run at the USA's Summer Games medal supremacy.
7:39 pm | August 29, 2004 | Andre Ward was the first U.S. boxer to win a gold medal at the Athens Olympics, ending two weeks of frustration for the team that once dominated in the ring.
6:59 pm | August 29, 2004 | Steven Lopez's gold medal in the taekwondo competition was one of a flurry of medals at the Games' finish that pushed the United States over its publicly stated goal of 100 medals and kept the U.S. team on top of the medal count for a third consecutive Olympics.