As the calendar turns to July, athletes from around the globe finish their preparations for next month's Summer Olympics, that quadrennial exercise in unabashed jingoism in which fans on every continent tune in to root in unqualified terms for their fellow countrymen and women. What to make, then, of the curious case of the 2004 U.S. men's basketball team, the team that Americans loved to hate?

First, the requisite sports background. Historically, the United States has been the unquestioned juggernaut of international basketball. Before 2004, the men's team had only lost two games in all of Olympics history, both to the Soviet Union, one a highly controversial 1972 contest in which the referees allowed the final three seconds to be replayed not once but twice. Opening the Olympics to professional basketball players in 1992 only seemed to reinforce U.S. supremacy, as members of the "Dream Team" in Barcelona (right) regularly ran up lopsided victories in between signing pre-game autographs and posing for post-game photos with opponents.

But by the 2000 Sydney Games, the gap in the playing field had clearly narrowed. The U.S. team was held to single-digit victory margins in multiple games, and barely escaped a semifinal match-up with Lithuania, 85-83, en route to another gold medal. The stage was set for the end to U.S. hegemony, what with the improved caliber of international play combined with the apparent belief of U.S. basketball officials that they could throw together at short notice a winning team of professional All-Stars with little regard for positional depth or team chemistry.

This all played out before our eyes in the 2004 Athens Games. Against teams that had practiced together as a unit for months if not years, without numerous superstars who had turned down the opportunity to compete for Olympic gold, using a roster lacking sufficient numbers of ballhandlers and perimeter shooters to beat defenses well-schooled in international ball, the U.S. lost an exhibition to unheralded Italy. They then lost the opening game of the tournament to Puerto Rico by a whopping 19 points. Two more losses followed before they salvaged a bronze, but this team would be known not for its medal, but rather for losing more games in one Olympics than the U.S. had previously lost in the combined history of the Olympic Games.

And America noticed. In an espn.com poll of 20,000 people taken during the competition 54% of American respondents said they wanted to see the team lose. Another 20% said they'd "kind of" like to see the U.S. lose. It was an unscientific poll, but the idea that three-fourths of the American sporting populace was rooting against the U.S. team was reinforced by call-in talk radio shows and informal conversations with sports fans. In an unprecedented occurrence, the vast majority of Americans were rooting against a U.S. Olympic team.

Why? While there are many possible explanations for this turn of events in U.S. fandom, there's a compelling argument to be made that race played a role, as all 12 members of the U.S. team were Black. First of all, much of the commentary voiced by those rooting against the team seemed to echo the types of sentiment often heard among individuals who harbor subtle (and not so subtle) forms of racial bias. Sports columnist Jason Whitlock detailed one such exchange on his call-in radio show:

Second, though there were other, race-neutral explanations available, many of them seem to lose traction upon closer examination. Fans were angered by all the big-name players who turned down the invitation to join the team? Well, why would they then root against the players who agreed to play?

Fans were turned off by uninspired play from millionaire athletes? OK, but why wasn't there a similar fan mutiny against the similarly disappointing 1998 U.S. men's ice hockey team? That team of professional players was even more disappointing, failing to win any medal. Plus, numerous members behaved even worse off the ice, famously trashing their rooms at the Olympic Village after being eliminated from competition.

It's at least reasonable to consider the possibility that fans were so quick to turn on the basketball team because many Americans felt less of a connection to this group of young, rich (and in some cases, dreadlocked and heavily tattooed) Black men than they usually do to other athletes, even other multi-millionaire athletes. Such a hypothesis is consistent with the image concerns of the powers-that-be in the National Basketball Association, as witnessed by its recent implementation of a dress code for injured bench players. It's one that Phil Taylor, a columnist for Sports Illustrated, ponders in this week's issue of the magazine. And it's a hypothesis that would also be very consistent with current psychological research on contemporary racial bias, which suggests that modern prejudice often emerges in subtle ways, absent tell-tale signs of overt antipathy or an intentional effort to discriminate.

Mind you, I am not suggesting that the fans who rooted against the U.S. team were rabid racists. Rather, I simply propose that whatever perceived commonalities allow us to bond and identify with our athletic heroes might not be quite as strong and resilient for predominantly White fans of a predominantly Black sport as they are for other rooting relationships. Sure, when all is going well, it's easy to pull for all members of our favorite teams, to put aside societal stereotypes and other preconceived notions. But the ties that bind may be more fragile when the road to success starts getting bumpy: the player characteristics we'll overlook and abide when rooting for a winning team might not be as easy to swallow on a team that frustrates its fan base.

The influence of race on social perception is always a controversial issue and it's difficult to prove in any given instance. In this day and age, no one ever admits to being biased by race. In any particular situation, there are always alternative, race-neutral explanations available for the outcome in question. And most White Americans resist seeing racial bias in anything other than cut-and-dry examples of blatant, intentional bigotry. But as the 2008 U.S. men's basketball team begins its final preparations for Beijing, it's interesting to consider the potential role of race as we revisit the curious case of the 2004 squad, the rare exception to the jingoism of sports fans, the anomalous U.S. Olympic team that Americans loved to hate.

I'm sure many of you will read this entry and disagree, will argue that race had nothing to do with the public response to the 2004 team. So just to stir things up a bit more, allow me to leave you with one final argument for discussion and debate, one that riles up almost any sports fan with whom I share it: Allen Iverson is a future Hall-of-Fame basketball player who has made a career out of fearlessly throwing his undersized, 6', 170-lb. frame into crowds of players far taller and stronger than he is.

If Iverson looked like this:

instead of looking like this:

his slight stature and redemptive life story would make him the most popular athlete in the country, festooned in bedroom posters from Dallas to Dubuque, as opposed a prototypical example cited by many White sports fans regarding their disillusionment with today's athletes.

As they say, discuss amongst yourselves...