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Women Won More Than Half Of Team USA’s Medals—And More Of The Attention, Too
Winning an Olympic medal is most athletes’ ultimate dream. It marks the culmination of a lifetime of hard work, sacrifice, and determination. That Olympic glory creates overnight celebrities, turns casual fans into diehards, and these days, sparks plenty of viral memes. It also makes athletes very, very, tired.
Just ask Alex “Spiff” Sedrick, the United States rugby player who scored a last-second try to secure her team’s first-ever medal—a bronze—on August 30 in Paris. After three days of competition playing multiple matches per day, the players did a midnight interview followed by a full day of media interviews that started the next morning.
“I'm still going, but I'm just so grateful,” Sedrick told Women’s Health at the Team USA House in Paris, one of the final stops on her marathon media tour. “We've asked for this coverage before, and we've wanted people to pay attention to this sport. So really, we asked for this, and we love it.”
At the first Olympics ever to achieve gender parity, women make up an equal amount of the competitors in Paris and are dominating both the headlines and the medal counts. The U.S. won more medals than any other country, with the female competitor responsible for more than half of them—and their 26 gold medals are more than any women's team has won in the history of the Olympics. Team USA's women won so many medals in Paris—67, to be exact—that if they made up their own nation, they would have been third in the overall medal count.
For many athletes, it’s just the beginning of a long-fought battle for coverage, funding, and respect—but Paris feels fundamentally different because significant change seems to be happening in real time.
“A lot of times, women are taught to tone themselves down or try to take up less space,” Sedrick says. “In our sport, we can't do that.” Especially not now, when the world is watching.
Likes, Views, Shares, Medals, and Money
Two-time Olympian Ilona Maher, Sedrick’s teammate and one of the Paris Games’ biggest social media sensations, told WH earlier this year that her fun TikToks from inside the Olympic Village, which started going viral this summer, actually started in the buildup to the Tokyo Games in 2021. She made them not necessarily just to raise her own profile, but also to lift up and draw attention to the sport she loves. “We want other people to watch rugby in the Olympics, and I want other girls to get into rugby,” she said.
It’s an added bonus that Maher can use her social media fame to provide a second income, which is often a necessity for women who can’t afford to live on their professional sports salary alone. It’s an open secret that many Olympians have to pick up side hustles and second jobs in order to follow their sports dreams. “It was a calculated move,” she says. “But it was just kind of organically seeing [that] people really responded to it.”
By the time the U.S. women’s rugby team won bronze, it was the perfect storm for a major “moment.” The country was rallying around this fun-loving (and deeply hardworking) team more than it ever had, and media attention reached an all-time high.
This enthusiasm also translated into real dollars. Mere hours after their milestone victory, businesswoman and investor Michelle Kang, who owns multiple professional women’s soccer teams including the Washington Spirit, announced a donation of $4 million to the U.S. women’s rugby program over the next four years. “As far as I know, we've never had that kind of impact in one moment,” Sedrick says.
“It feels so great. Like, that's what we deserve,” Maher adds. “We deserve that, and we really feel that way.” And both players agree this investment will set them up to be in the best possible position for the Los Angeles Games in 2028.
“We are going to be getting a lot of new fans coming in,” Sedrick says. “Ilona just surpassed 2 million followers on Instagram, so obviously a lot of eyes are on us. I think we're going to get a lot of people picking up a rugby ball that might have never before.”
Where There’s Buy-In, There’s Potential
A few days after the rugby team made history, across town, near the banks of the Seine River at the La Concorde urban park, the Team U.S.A women’s 3x3 basketball team secured their own bronze medal.
While many countries spend four years preparing for the Olympic 3x3 and send their top professional players to compete, the U.S. team “kind of got thrown together within a couple of weeks,” says basketball player Hailey Van Lith, a college senior who recently transferred to Texas Christian University. After starting pool play with a 0-3 record, many counted the U.S. team out of medal contention. But they clawed their way back during the semifinals. “We weren’t always the most prepared team, but we were the toughest team,” Van Lith says.
“3x3 takes a lot of chemistry, and there's a lot of nuances to it that you learn with more experience,” says teammate Cierra Burdick, who plays professional basketball overseas and has been playing 3x3 at the national level for over a decade. “We knew we were at a disadvantage in that category, but we just grinded it out. We didn't give up.”
While the players are proud of the resiliency and fight it took to win bronze despite so little time training together, their experience has them wondering about what their potential might be if the U.S. invested even more time and money in the sport. “Now, I need redemption,” says WNBA star Dearica Hamby, who joined the team last minute when original starter Cameron Brink suffered a torn ACL.
“It's a kind of underlooked sport right now, but it's so much fun,” Hamby says. “I think this Olympics shows that we have to pour into it as much as we do five-on-five.”
As the women’s basketball team continues its quest for a record eighth straight gold medal, two of its biggest stars are actually leading the charge to support the 3x3 movement. Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier recently co-founded Unrivaled, a 3-on-3 and 1-on-1 league launching in the WNBA offseason that will boast the highest average salary in women's professional sports league history. Their vision? Provide WNBA players an opportunity to earn money playing basketball stateside in the offseason, while keeping up year-round momentum for the sport and its biggest stars.
Early investors include soccer stars Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe and golfer Michelle Wie West. Fan-favorite WNBA players like Chelsea Gray, Arike Ogunbowale, Angel Reese as well as Olympic 3x3 player Rhyne Howard have signed on to play.
“We honestly hit market at the perfect time, with the explosion in women's sports right now,” Collier says. “Buy-in from players and from brands has not been hard at all—just explaining it, what we're trying to do, what our vision is. It's so obvious when you explain it.”
The yet-to-be-announced format will look slightly different from Olympic 3x3, but Howard thinks the overwhelming early support will create a ripple effect that could help Team USA become a formidable contender for the Los Angeles Games. “Especially with the names coming in, I think a lot of people will watch,” she says. “And then for 3x3, when it comes to the Olympics in ‘28, I think people will want to watch to see how it translates or see the similarities and differences.”
Creating Olympic Joy Year-Round
Who says we only have to enjoy Olympic sports every four years, anyways? Some investors, like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, are seeing potential in creating exciting sporting events off-cycle.
Ohanian’s company SevenSevenSix is already a lead investor in the National Women’s Soccer League’s Angel City FC, but one of his newest projects has created a September track meet for women in New York City called Athlos. Olympic gold medalists like Gabby Thomas and Faith Kipyegon will vie for the largest purse ever at a women’s track event ($60,000 for first place and incremental prizes for every lane). Megan Thee Stallion is also slated to perform.
“It’s the same energy that I saw in Angel City in 2019 when I said I was going to buy a women’s soccer team, or start one, because the World Cup had shown up and everyone was paying attention to these amazing women, but the professional league was failing them the rest of the time,” Ohanian says. “I saw that as a great business opportunity. I see the same thing with track.”
Ohanian is giving participating athletes a 10 percent share in ticket revenue and broadcasting rights, and says that any entrant who wins a gold medal in Paris will receive an extra $60,000 in cash. (In general, he believes strongly in women athletes getting paid—when Olympic discus thrower Veronica Fraley tweeted that she couldn’t pay her rent this summer, he immediately wrote her a check for $7,760, a nod to his company.)
“The job’s not finished,” he says. “We’re going to keep that momentum up, keep the world’s eyes on this sport, keep the world seeing it in a blue chip, premium way that it deserves to be.”
Ohanian was recently spotted at Stade de France watching track alongside rapper Flavor Flav, who made headlines recently for his sponsorship of the U.S. women’s water polo team. A celeb’s presence at sporting events can do wonders for the team’s marketing—and in Paris, TV chef Guy Fieri, South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley, and First Lady Jill Biden were all seen at water polo matches falling in love with the game and posting about how fun it was on social media.
“Hopefully the way that people see our sport, see us as ambassadors for our sport, leads to more conversations about how cool it is to play water polo and how engaging the sport is,” goalie Ashleigh Johnson told WH after the water polo team advanced to quarterfinals on August 2. “That translates to dollars and investments and maybe eventually a league in the U.S. That would be super cool.”
And no, this star-studded audience is not a distraction for the athletes. In fact, the best part about it is that it means they can focus more on their game, says three-time gold medalist Maggie Steffens. “Right now, our job, to keep that momentum going, is to do what we need to do, which is be our best and go out there and try to win. That’s our job. And if we can do that, I think more will come,” she says. “That's something we'll come to in two weeks. But right now, we're honestly like, ‘Got to get home, got to recover, and just try to be better tomorrow.’”
Talk Doesn’t Have To Be Cheap
Every Olympian WH spoke to in Paris agrees that there's a very simple way fans can help keep this enthusiasm for women’s sports going long after the Closing Ceremony: Keep up with your favorite athletes–on social media or otherwise–and recognize that they’re competing all the time, not just every four years.
Take swimming, which drew some of the loudest and most vibrant crowds in Paris. “We have a lot of big competitions in between the Olympics. We have world championship meets, we have national level meets that all lead up to the Olympics, but are pretty much the same athletes swimming in them,” 14-time Olympic medalist Katie Ledecky, who will soon don her Ralph Lauren racing jacket as flag bearer at the Closing Ceremony, tells WH. “I'd love it if people would continue to come out to our meets, support us, cheer us on, especially leading into Los Angeles when swimming will be showcased in the United States.”
Athletes also want fans to keep talking about their sports with the same energy they do during the Olympics. And it’s especially important, as former WNBA MVP and defending gold medalist A’ja Wilson puts it, to “talk about it in a light that looks like everyone gets a piece of the pie.” Put simply, every team is full of talented professional athletes whose stories deserve to be told, just as much as the one or two superstars that tend to dominate news cycles.
“[It’s] just talking about it in uplifting ways,” Wilson says. “Sometimes you need to stay in the moment and give people their flowers while they’re here, because once they’re gone…These moments don’t come by often.”
Until 2024, in fact, these moments generally popped up only every four years—but this time feels different. Athletes and audiences are hopeful that the momentum, enthusiasm, investments, and energy are here to stay.
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