Steph Curry praises Kamala Harris and hopes US Olympic team can unite divided country

The USA basketball star Stephen Curry threw his support behind Kamala Harris’s bid for the White House on Thursday and said he believed a successful US Olympic campaign could help unite a divided nation in the run-up to America’s bitterly contested presidential election.

The four-time NBA champion and Olympic debutant, back in the national team for the first time in a decade, spoke warmly about Harris, a former California senator who was born in Oakland and is a longtime supporter of Curry’s Golden State Warriors.

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“It’s a very interesting time for our country, for sure,” Curry said to a crowd of several hundred reporters. “The fact that President Biden gave the endorsement, Vice-President Harris is primed to bring her energy to this campaign and, hopefully, if she’s on the ticket, winning the election. It’s a big deal, to say the least.”

Harris, who visited Curry and Co at their Las Vegas training camp earlier this month, has developed a friendly rapport with the Warriors star through the years, based largely on their deep San Francisco connections and aligned political views.

“She represents the Bay Area,” Curry said. “She’s been a big supporter of us, so I want to give that energy back to her. We’re representing our country here, and this is a very monumental next couple of months for the direction where we’re headed. Hopefully, this is a great way to do our part to continue unifying our country with how sports brings a lot of people together. For her, in this moment, knowing what’s ahead, it’s all about positive energy and optimism, knowing how divided our country is right now. [I’m] just excited for the journey ahead for her.”

Curry helped the United States to Fiba world championships in 2010 and 2014 – the United States are a perfect 18-0 with him on the roster – but the 36-year-old will make his long-awaited Olympic debut on Sunday when the Americans launch their campaign against a Serbia team led by three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokić.

Whether Curry’s former Warriors teammate Kevin Durant will be ready for Sunday’s opener is less certain. The three-time Olympic champion, who missed the entirety of Team USA’s five-game exhibition slate while dealing with a calf injury, said on Thursday his fitness remains a day-to-day situation.

“Each day is going to get better,” Durant said. “Another intense practice and we’ll see how I feel.”

Curry and Durant are among the headliners of a US men’s team hotly tipped to win a fourth straight Olympic gold medal. Four of the projected starters – LeBron James (four), Curry (two), Durant and Joel Embiid (one apiece) – have combined to win eight NBA MVP awards. Jayson Tatum, Jrue Holiday, Devin Booker and Bam Adebayo all return from the gold medal-winning team in Tokyo. Anthony Edwards and Tyrese Haliburton have emerged as two of the league’s brightest young stars. All but one of the 12 players were selected as NBA All-Stars this season while the other, Holiday, was named to the league’s all-defensive first team.

After finishing their pre-Olympic tuneups with Monday’s narrow win over Germany at London’s O₂ Arena, the US squad took the Eurostar from St Pancras for a brief practice session in Lille – where they will play group-stage contests with Serbia, South Sudan (31 July) and Puerto Rico (3 August) at the Pierre Mauroy Stadium – before continuing on to the luxury Paris hotel where they will be based for the duration of the Games.

Curry, who said he spent the train ride watching YouTube videos on how the Channel tunnel was built, said he was confident the team would be able to manage the pressure to win, despite some bumpy performances in warmup games that included a narrow win over South Sudan, who are ranked 33rd in the world.

“Once the game starts, it’s just basketball,” he said. “You kind of get lost in whatever the atmosphere of that particular game is and whatever the challenge is to win that particular game. The only thing you think about is just it’s not 82 games, and there’s no pacing yourself. You can’t go 0-2 and be like, ‘Oh, we’re good, we’ll learn the lessons and figure it out from there.’ It’s a sprint. It’s a very March Madness kind of style. Just to be able to lock into every practice – not that we don’t do that in the league – but every practice means something.

“It was great that we went 5-0 [on the exhibition tour] and won a lot of different ways and tried to figure it out on the fly. Everything’s condensed and that’s the really only pressure, including the exhibitions. It’s only an 11-game journey and you’ve got to be able to adapt quickly. You’ve got to be able to bring your egos of who we are as individual players, but also let them go knowing it doesn’t matter who’s the man’s score on that particular night. When you’re on the floor, you’re asked to do a certain thing, do it to the best of your ability, play with energy. As Team USA, if we do that, usually good things happen.”