ESPN Olympic Sports

Marc Serota for the National Volleyball LeagueTodd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser will take on Pimlico this weekend.

Some of the most striking images from the 2012 Summer Games are sure to come from the beach volleyball venue at Horse Guards Parade in central London. The sand-spikers will take over a patch of earth surrounded by grand government buildings best known for the annual Trooping of the Colour, where soldiers mark the Queen's birthday.

Defending Olympic gold medalists Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers plan to warm up by playing at a world-famous horse track.

Dalhausser and Rogers are part of a 16-team men's field in the season-opening event for the National Volleyball League on Friday and Saturday. Men's and women's teams competed Friday at Baltimore Beach on the Inner Harbor. Teams that advanced to the semifinals will be part of the infield festival at Pimlico Race Course on Saturday as the day's card builds to the second jewel of the Triple Crown, the Preakness Stakes.

The juxtaposition may seem odd, but in a phone interview Thursday, Rogers said playing at Pimlico "ranks highly on the scale of coolness." That needs to be taken seriously, since the 38-year-old has played on some of the most picturesque beaches on the planet.

Dalhausser said Pimlico will definitely rate as one of his top five venues.

"Obviously, we're kind of a sideshow, but it'll expose some people to the sport," he said -- and he expects London to take over at No. 1. "The women had a test event there last year, and the American team could not stop talking about what a cool spot it was."

Rogers and Dalhausser, 32, will defend their title in London in what is almost certainly their last Olympics together. They've been the best team in the world since joining forces in 2007, but Rogers, married with two young daughters, said it's time for him to get off the road. He is leaning toward playing the 2013 season and then pursuing his interest in coaching, tournament promotion or perhaps a business outside the sport, although he said he "can't imagine being totally out of it."

Dalhausser said he'll stick with Rogers until his partner retires. "Dumping him at this point would be a heartless thing to do, and he's still a great player, so it would be a stupid thing to do on the court as well," he said.

Both expect this Olympics to be easier to navigate. From the moment Dalhausser and Rogers lined up for the Opening Ceremony in hot, humid Beijing, they found the tournament draining physically and emotionally in a way they couldn't have expected. They were upset by Latvia in their first match.

"Latvia said they played the best they'd ever played -- thanks for having it against us," Rogers said. "Having the experience of having been there will be key."

Dalhausser said the rhythm of the Olympic tournament, with off-days between matches, "messed with me," giving him too much time to stew about what had happened and what was to come. (In league play, teams generally play every day for four straight days if they keep winning.)

"I'm going to be a bit more relaxed this year," he said. "Whatever we do will be the cherry on top, because we've already accomplished our ultimate career goal."

AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

LOS ANGELES -- Twelve years ago, Heather Petri heard her name announced as a member of the inaugural U.S. women's Olympic water polo team. On Thursday afternoon at the Los Angeles headquarters of the LA84 Foundation, Petri, now 33, heard her name announced for the fourth consecutive time, making her one of two women on the 2012 squad who is heading to London to compete in her fourth-straight Olympic Games.

"The excitement of finding out hasn't worn off," Petri said. "I still get butterflies. I still felt giddy when Coach [Adam Krikorian] told me I'd made the team. I don't ever want to lose that feeling."

Before the Olympic team announcement, LA84 Foundation President and IOC member Anita DeFrantz spoke about her own experience finding out she made the 1976 Olympic rowing team.

"It was so barbaric back then," she said. "They wrote our names on a piece of paper that was tacked to the boathouse. Then we had to select someone willing to go and read the names. This is way cool. It's an honor to look in the eyes of the members of the water polo team as you wear your uniforms for the first time. That's a big deal."

DeFrantz then introduced head coach Krikorian, who took over the program in 2009, less than a year after the team's silver-medal performance in Beijing. He spoke about the emotional week that preceded the announcement and how hard it was to cut the team from 17 to 13. Then he announced each team member's name and asked the women to join him on stage. On the team are eight returning Olympians and three current college students. Petri is the oldest member of the team, while 18-year-old defender Maggie Steffens, sister of defender Jessica Steffens, is the youngest.

"We have such a good blend of young energy and experienced team members who know what the next two months will bring," said Petri, who plans to retire from competitive water polo, along with four-time Olympian Brenda Villa, after London. "In 2000, I didn't understand what I was getting into and the year just flew by me. Now I can soak it all in, take joy in the smallest things and pass along my knowledge to the younger members of the team."

Over the past three years, the U.S. women's team competed in seven major international tournaments and won six of them. The one blemish on its otherwise perfect recent résumé is a sixth-place finish at the 2011 FINA World Championships in Shanghai, which accounts for its current ranking of sixth in the world. "Realistically, I'd say we're more like second or third in the world," Krikorian said. "Australia has proven to have the best competitive record, but Russia and Italy are up there, too."

This year, international competition is so stiff that neither the Netherlands (the 2008 Olympic gold medalists) nor Greece (the team currently ranked No. 1 in the world) qualified for London.

"In the past, it would be easy to target one or two teams as our biggest competition," Krikorian said. "But this year, any one of those eight teams could win. We are the best defensive team in the world. And when we're in sync, we're very tough to beat."

The U.S. team also has as much depth at each position as it ever has.

"With most teams, it's easy to pick out the few superstars and prepare for them," Krikorian said. "You can't do that with us. We are very hard to prepare for because we have 13 women they need to prepare for, every game."

And now, their country knows their names.

DALLAS -- Win an Olympic gold medal and lose once in 59 games, and no one pays attention. Lose a World Cup in the middle of a slow sports summer, and marketers and media knock down the doors.

That's been the upended world of the U.S. women's soccer team in the past four years. The sports world hardly noted the squad that stormed back from an opening-game loss to top the podium in Beijing. "In 2008, we won a gold medal, and there was really no talk about us," midfielder Carli Lloyd said. "It was crazy."

Nor did people pay much attention as Pia Sundhage's team continued an unbeaten streak that lasted until a shocking World Cup qualifier loss to Mexico in November 2010.

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AP Photo/Martin MeissnerThe U.S. women's team lost to Japan on penalty kicks in last summer's World Cup final.

Now, though, the U.S. team is in high demand; and thanks to the male under-23 side's failure to qualify for London, it will have the American Olympic soccer stage to itself. Keeper Hope Solo famously competed on "Dancing with the Stars," newcomer Alex Morgan famously donned body paint in Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue, and Abby Wambach belatedly garnered the media recognition that her Hall of Fame career merits.

It all stems from one moment in the World Cup quarterfinal against Brazil last July in Germany, when Wambach's dying-moment goal sent the match to penalty kicks, enabling the U.S. to advance.

"What sold everything was the Brazil game; that was the endorsement game," Lloyd said Tuesday at the Olympic media summit. "That did it for everybody. To have such a dramatic game like that drew so many fans, fans who don't even watch soccer. It's been great."

The thriller commenced a summer soap opera in which the Americans slipped past France in a tight semifinal game and lost a heartbreaker on penalty kicks against Japan in the final, a drama that kept fans glued to the tube and Twitter.

The long-ignored squad was full of overnight celebrities, and they've had staying power.

"We have superstars now," midfielder Lauren Cheney said. "Hope's a superstar. Alex is a superstar. Abby's a superstar. The outside stuff, Vogue magazine, 'Dancing with the Stars,' all of that is awesome."

A year and a half ago, Morgan was a college kid in a dorm room at Cal. Now, she's a marketing machine and an Internet phenomenon. "I have gotten overwhelmed at times," she said. "I've tried to stay level-headed, I've tried to still look to my family and my friends for support. I've really tried to balance my schedule right."

She seems to be handling it. The youngest member of the team has become a regular starter at forward for Sundhage, and her goals have come even more frequently than her endorsement opportunities. (She has 11 goals in eight games.)

"Leading up to the Olympics, I want soccer to be a priority," she said. "I just need to take a step back when I get overwhelmed."

The players say the added attention hasn't created any rifts in the locker room. Quite the contrary.

"Everyone's down-to-earth on our team. No one's got a huge head from what they've done, and it's perfect," Lloyd said. "When we're together, half the time we're not even talking about that stuff. It's been great for our team, great for women and great for women's soccer."

DALLAS -- The United States women's basketball team has won the gold medal in the past four Olympics and six of the past seven. So what would be a bigger shock, for the women or the men to come home without a gold medal from London?

"I'm hoping that enough people are watching what we're doing that if we don't win, they'll be absolutely shocked," U.S. women's coach Geno Auriemma said. "Because you know the majority of the entire world will be watching our men. And I would also venture to say that the majority of the world hopes our men lose. They won't be shocked, they'll be happy. For us, I think the perception is there is no way we can lose and they'll be very, very surprised if we don't win the gold medal."

[+] Enlarge
AP Photo/Elaine ThompsonGeno Auriemma and the U.S. women's team will gather again on July 14 to resume training for the London Games.

"I can't necessarily speak for the world," U.S. and former Connecticut forward Maya Moore said, "but I will be shocked if anything less than the gold comes back."

Auriemma said Baylor star Brittney Griner had a good chance of being selected for the final spot on the Olympic squad before she took herself out of the running. Griner announced in a press release that she could not play due to an unspecified family illness and issues with her summer school schedule.

"It is unusual," Auriemma said. "It's hard to put yourself in their shoes, but people have to make a decision based on what is best for them at that point in time. Maybe they come to regret that decision, maybe not. Maybe they get another two, three or four opportunities down the road, maybe not. But for some of these players, this is once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

"For the non-basketball players -- they don't get selected, they have to earn their opportunity. They have to win sprints or win swim meets -- it's not like being a basketball player where you get a phone call, 'Would you like to be on the Olympic team?' You have to commit your whole life and it comes down to one-tenth of a second. Where you've been preparing your whole life for that one moment and it's gone. I think basketball players take it for granted that, 'Oh yeah, as long as I keep playing well, I'll always have a chance to play in the Olympics.' And that's not always the case."

Auriemma will have a very familiar roster given that exactly half of the 12-player roster played for him at UConn: Moore, Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird, Asjha Jones, Swin Cash and Tina Charles.

"With the limited amount of time that we have to prepare, there is a familiarity that has carried over throughout the years," Auriemma said. "More importantly, having 10 of the 12 players from the 2010 world championship team come back and play in the Olympics is more significant than having the six UConn players. Obviously, I have a connection and relationship with the six players from UConn, but getting those 10 players to come back, that's what gives us the edge over some of the other teams."

Auriemma said the top challengers to the U.S. for gold are Australia (which has won the past three silver medals) and Russia, but neither team medaled at the 2010 world championships and Auriemma said that's evidence of how the women's game has grown worldwide. Not that everyone necessarily buys that. One reporter asked Auriemma if the women's game would grow faster if the U.S. wasn't so dominant.

"I get asked that question all the time at UConn," Auriemma said. "I get it a million times. 'Wouldn't it be better if someone other than UConn won the national championship?' Well, we've tried to accommodate that the last few years. We're doing our part to grow the game.

"But when you set a certain standard for excellence and how the game should be played, you are growing the game. You are challenging people to reach that standard, that level. If someone does come along and beats the U.S. in the gold-medal game or any Olympic game, then we will have had a big part in why that happened, in growing the game to that level. That's why we have to get better."

Auriemma stressed that the world is changing rapidly and the days of one country dominating in one sport are either over or close to over. "But we're going to hang on as long as we can, right Maya?"

DALLAS -- Submitted for your approval: a couple of pieces of evidence that the world has changed, just a little, in the past 40 years, on a stage in a hotel ballroom in Dallas.

In the middle of the afternoon, First Lady Michelle Obama championed the cause of a broad-based national fitness initiative in front of a multi-hued contingent of male and female athletes, including Paralympians. That sentence alone says quite a bit about change.

An hour or so later, the coach of the U.S. women's basketball team and a star player compared notes on what the world was like at the inception of Title IX, and how it is now.

Maya Moore, who plays a sport that wasn't in the Olympics 40 years ago and in a professional league that wasn't conceivable back then, dutifully and honestly paid tribute to the law.

"I can't really imagine growing up in a world where someone said, 'No, you can't play basketball because you're female,'" said Moore, the Connecticut alum who followed up her WNBA title season with Minnesota by winning the Spanish and European championships this spring with Ros Casares Valencia.

But coach Geno Auriemma, the much-decorated UConn coach, painted the best picture of progress looks like, or rather, what it sounds like. When Title IX was first implemented, he said, "I was a senior in high school, and my idea of women actually being athletes, female athletes -- that wasn't a word you'd have used back then."

His boys basketball team had to share court time with girls at his suburban Philly Catholic school. "We were just horrified that we had to give up the gym to those girls," he said. "The prevailing thought back then was, 'They're wearing skirts. They're wearing these little pennies,' you know? They're not even athletes. They had their fingernails polished in all different colors, and the idea that people would even think of them as athletes was so foreign, it's incredible."

Now?

"Fast forward to Maya Moore, and the idea that you would think of Maya Moore as anything other than a great athlete is just absurd," he said.

Auriemma offered his son Michael as an example. "Today, my son's 23 and just finished playing in college. If you ever told him that women didn't play basketball and weren't great athletes, as many practices as he went to growing up, he'd say, 'What world do you live in?'"

Auriemma's point is that, for most people under 30, acceptance of Title IX comes as naturally as breathing.

"My perspective on Title IX is, hopefully soon, there comes a time when you stop talking about it," he said. "Because it's ancient history now. We shouldn't forget that history, but we've moved so far. I'm sure there are still fights that have to be fought, but it's time to celebrate the achievements these women make as athletes, not as female athletes. We play basketball, we don't play women's basketball. That's my proudest contribution, I think."