The upset in Athens

In August 2004, at the Olympic Games in Athens, the United States men's basketball team opened its tournament against Puerto Rico. The American roster, coached by Larry Brown, was loaded: Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson, LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, and Dwyane Wade took the court. Nobody expected what came next.

Puerto Rico won by 19 points. It remains the largest margin of defeat in the Olympic history of American basketball, and it snapped a 24-game Olympic winning streak for the United States dating back to 1992, the first year NBA players were allowed to compete. A team of NBA All-Stars had lost, and clearly, to a national program that had never won an Olympic medal of its own.

The loss to Puerto Rico was not an isolated stumble either. The United States lost two more games in that tournament — to Lithuania and, in the semifinals, to Argentina — and settled for bronze. It was the most losses a U.S. men's Olympic team had suffered in a single Games, and the game against Puerto Rico was the one that began to dismantle the tournament.

For Puerto Rico, the triumph brought no medal. The national team has played in nine Olympic Games and twelve World Championships across its history without medaling. That absence is part of what makes the Athens result remembered as it is: a single game, decades later, precisely because it was not supposed to happen, and because nothing like it followed.

Two decades later, the 2004 opener remains the reference point whenever American Olympic dominance comes up: the game in which a Puerto Rican roster, favorites of no one on paper, beat the best players the mainland could send to Greece.

The score underscored a broader shift in international basketball already under way: NBA talent alone no longer guaranteed an Olympic sweep. Puerto Rico proved it on the first night of the tournament, exposing a heavily favored roster before a worldwide television audience, before the Americans had even settled into the Games. For a national program that still had no medal, it was a result that outlived the tournament.

Sources: Seleccion olimpica masculina de baloncesto de Estados Unidos, 2004. Freeze 2026-08-22.