The once-great US men’s track team failed to win a solo gold in Tokyo. Why?

When Noah Lyles finished third in the 200m final this week, he called his hardware “boring”. When Grant Holloway took silver in the 110m hurdles, he repeatedly used the word “sucks” with reporters after the race.

Both men seemed glum, disappointed. They’d lost. They’d failed. Never mind that Lyles’s time was the fastest he’s run all season, that only 16 men have ever finished the race faster than he did this week. And we should totally disregard the fact that Holloway’s finish was all of 50 milliseconds slower than the gold medal time.

Or… should we? Lyles’s and Holloway’s near-misses loom large – larger than they should, perhaps – because the US men’s track team will return from Tokyo without a single individual gold medal for the first time in modern Olympic history. (That’s with the exception of 1980, when the US didn’t attend and consequently didn’t medal at all.) And while it’s possible to wonder how that happened, it’s also important to remember: This is a far cry from failure.

Related: Allyson Felix ends her Olympic career a fighter both on and off the track | Andy Bull

These Olympics have been a hotbed of self-flagellation across many sports. Shoichiro Mukai, a member of Japan’s judo team, apologized after winning a silver medal. Kenichiro Fumita, a Japanese wrestler, sobbed after a loss in the gold medal bout – a loss that yielded him a silver. And British boxer Ben Whittaker also shed tears upon coming in second, calling himself a failure.

The US men haven’t gone that far in their public disappointment, and here’s hoping they won’t. They won individual medals in the 100m, the 200m (silver and bronze!), the 5000m, the 110m hurdles and the 400m hurdles (where Rai Benjamin topped the previous world record). And they ended their meet with a relay gold in the 4x400m. The US track and field team as a whole won the most golds of any squad at these games, with seven. Overall, they won 26 total medals, 17 more than Jamaica, Kenya and Poland, who are tied for the second-most although six of the US’s seven golds were won by the women’s team.

They’ve been dominant – just not quite as dominant as usual, as expected.

Last Olympics, in 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, the US brought home 32 track and field medals, 13 of them gold. Even with Usain Bolt maintaining his dominance in the sprints, the American men took gold in the 1500m, the 400m hurdles and the 4x400m relay. The prior Olympics, in London, the men won only one gold on the track, when Aries Merritt won the 110m hurdles, but there was a good explanation: Bolt was at his peak, and Team USA also had to contend with Great Britain’s Mo Farah and Kenya’s David Rudisha in middle-distance events.

This time around, though, the gold-medal drought feels different, in large part because the US men were favored in most sprints and middle distance races coming into Tokyo; Team USA’s roster featured the fastest men in the world in the 100m, 200m and 400m. And at the most recent world championships, they won the 100m, 200m, 800m and 110m hurdles, giving no indication their talent would be tailing off anytime soon.

And maybe it didn’t. Maybe other countries just edged a step closer, and in sport governed by milliseconds, the country with the most collective track talent was edged by a few stellar performances. After all, the US still won the most medals overall in the men’s sprints, and the men’s track golds went not to one or two powerhouse countries, but to a smattering: Italy, Canada, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Norway.

After this week’s slate of less-than-perfect results, a few US athletes have expressed displeasure at the lack of an Olympic training camp and the tight turnaround between trials and the Games, byproducts of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Officials barred athletes from moving into the Olympic Village more than five days before they competed, and the US elected not to set up its own camp for track and field athletes, which some other nations did. It was a decision made with athletes’ health and safety in mind, but it may also have bungled training and athletes’ acclimation to a foreign country.

And there are other explanations for the gold-medal drought, too. Christian Coleman, the fastest man on the US team, was banned from the Games after he missed a drug test in late 2019. He’d have been heavily favored in the 100m and might’ve given the men’s 4x100m relay, which failed to medal after a botched handoff, a boost.

The US team is also relatively inexperienced, and in a sport where stars often compete in two, three, four or even (in Allyson Felix’s case) five Games, youth can at times be a disadvantage. In 2016, more than half the gold medalists in men’s track events had prior Olympic experience.

Much of the US team should be back for 2024, due to their age and shorter turnaround time between the Games. They’ll be out to prove this summer was only an aberration, and before overreacting, perhaps they – and we – should listen to Michael Cherry, the sprinter who finished fourth in the 400m – and then won gold in the 4x400m relay.

“An Olympic medal is an Olympic medal,” he told reporters after the race. “You want gold, but if you can come out with anything that’s great.”