American basketball star Stephen Curry on Thursday endorsed Kamala Harris’ bid for the White House, saying he believes a successful U.S. Olympic campaign can unite a divided country ahead of a closely fought U.S. presidential election.
The four-time NBA champion and Olympic debutant, who is making his first national team appearance in a decade, spoke highly of Harris, a former California senator who was born in Oakland and has been a longtime supporter of Curry’s Golden State Warriors.
“It’s a very interesting time for our country, that’s for sure,” Curry told a crowd of hundreds of reporters. “The fact that President Biden has given the endorsement makes Vice President Harris ready to put her energy into this campaign and hopefully, if she’s on the ticket, win the election. It’s a big deal, to say the least.”
Harris, who Visited Curry and Co has built a strong bond over the years with the Warriors star, who he played during training camp in Las Vegas earlier this month, largely based on their close ties in San Francisco and their political views.
“She represents the Bay Area,” Curry said. “She’s a huge supporter of ours, so I want to give her that energy back. We’re here representing our country and this is a monumental couple of months for the direction we’re going. Hopefully this is a great way for us to do our part to continue to unite our country with how sports brings a lot of people together. For her, right now, knowing what’s coming, it’s all about positive energy and optimism, knowing how divided our country is right now. [I’m] just excited about the journey that awaits her.”
Curry helped the United States win the 2010 and 2014 Fiba World Championships — the United States is 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 open their campaign against a Serbian team led by three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokić.
Whether Curry’s former Warriors teammate Kevin Durant will be ready for Sunday’s season opener is less certain. The three-time Olympic champion, who missed the entire five-game exhibition game for Team USA with a calf injury, said Thursday that his fitness remains a day-to-day matter.
“Every day it’s getting better,” Durant said. “One more intense practice and then we’ll see how I feel.”
Curry and Durant are among the headliners on a U.S. men’s national team expected to win a fourth straight Olympic gold medal. Four of the projected starters – LeBron James (four), Curry (two), Durant and Joel Embiid (one each) – have won eight NBA MVP awards between them. 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 most promising 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.
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After wrapping up their preparations for the Olympic Games with a narrow victory over Germany on Monday in London,2 Arena, the US squad took the Eurostar from St Pancras for a short training session in Lille – where they play group stage matches with Serbia, South Sudan (July 31) and Puerto Rico (August 3) at the Pierre Mauroy Stadium – before travelling to the luxury hotel in Paris where they will stay for the duration of the Games.
Curry, who said he watched YouTube videos about the construction of the Channel Tunnel during the train journey, said he was confident the team could handle the pressure to win despite some struggling performances in warm-up matches, including a narrow win over South Sudan, ranked 33rd in the world.
“Once the game starts, it’s just basketball,” he said. “You get a little lost in the spirit of that particular game and what the challenge is to win that particular game. All you think about is that it’s not 82 games and you can’t pace yourself. You can’t go 0-2 and think, ‘Oh, we’re good, we’ll learn the lessons and figure it out.’ It’s a sprint. It’s a whole March Madness style. Just to be able to follow every training – not that we don’t do that in the competition – but every training 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 is condensed and that’s the only real pressure, including the exhibitions. It’s only an 11-game trip and you have to be able to adapt quickly. You have to be able to take your egos of who we are as individual players, but also let them go knowing that it doesn’t matter who the guy is scoring on that particular night. When you’re on the field, you’re asked to do something, do it the best you can, play with energy. As Team USA, when we do that, good things usually happen.”