Basketball · 1992 · Barcelona, Spain
The Dream Team
The United States sends active NBA professionals to the Olympics for the first time, and opposing players start asking them for autographs before tip-off.
8-0
Record
~44 points
Average winning margin
Gold medal
Result
Until 1992, Olympic basketball rules restricted competitors to amateurs, a rule that let a Soviet team of professionals in all but name beat a side of American college players in the contested 1972 final. Once FIBA changed the eligibility rules, the United States assembled a roster of active NBA stars for the Barcelona Games, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley and Karl Malone among them.
They were the Dream Team before the tournament had started, and they won all eight of their games by an average margin of 44 points without trailing at any point in any of them. Players from the national teams they were about to beat asked for photographs and autographs first, having grown up watching several of them.
The gold medal was the smallest part of it. Basketball went genuinely global off the back of that tournament, and the wave of international talent it inspired had reshaped the NBA itself inside a decade.
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