Smallwood: Women are now a major force for Team USA at the Olympics

OFFICIALLY, the 2016 Olympics do not begin until the Opening Ceremony on Friday in Rio de Janeiro, but the competition actually starts Wednesday with the first six games of women's soccer, including the United States against New Zealand.

After winning the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup last summer, the USA will look to take its fifth gold medal in six Olympic tournaments.

By contrast, the United States men failed to qualify for the third time in four Olympics.

Soccer, however, isn't the only sport in which female athletes will be counted on to uphold the gold-medal honor of the United States.

Some pre-Olympic predictions recently released by Sports Illustrated has more American women than men favored to bring home gold medals from Brazil. In men's team sports competition, the NBA-filled basketball squad is the only one from the U.S. predicted to win gold.

In addition to soccer, the U.S. women's basketball team is expected to win a sixth consecutive gold, while the indoor volleyball and water polo teams are also favored.

Overall, SI predicts that men from the United States will win 17 gold medals over the 17 days of competition while U.S. women will win 28 golds.

That would continue the trend of U.S. women carrying more torches than their male counterparts in the Olympics.

Four years ago at the 2012 London Games, the USA sent more female athletes than male athletes (269-261) to an Olympics for the first time ever. The difference will be even greater for Rio, with 292 of the United States' delegation of 555 athletes being female.

In London, women captured 29 of the 46 gold medals (63 percent) and 58 of the 103 total medals (56 percent) for Team USA.

Perhaps no sport at the 2012 Games shows the emergence of American women vs. the decline of American men more than boxing. American men got shut out in boxing medals, while middleweight Claressa Shields won gold and flyweight Marlen Esparza got bronze in the first ever Olympic women's boxing tournament.

Shields, who has lost only once in 75 fights, is expected to again win gold in Rio. No American man is predicted to win a medal.

In the high-profile Olympic track and field competition, the USA men got three gold medals in London, compared with six for the women. The men are predicted to double that count in Rio, while the women are favored in seven events, as is Gwen Jorgensen in the triathlon.

While the U.S. men have had only sporadic success in gymnastics, the women have become the best in the world, having won the team title in the Olympics in 2012 and the Worlds in 2011, 2014 and 2015.

The breakout star of these games could be USA gymnast Simone Biles, the three-time all-around world champion who is predicted to lead the USA to the team Olympic gold, as well as win the all-around competition and three (balance beam, floor exercise, vault) of the four individual golds.

In judo, Kayla Harrison (172 pounds) won the USA's first-ever gold medal in London and is favored to repeat in Rio.

The women's rowing eights team has won the last two Olympics.

World No.1-ranked tennis player Serena Williams is expected to defend her 2012 individual gold medal and the doubles gold she won with her sister, Venus.

Kerry Walsh-Jennings and April Ross, who ironically played against each other for the gold in London, are underdogs to the homecourt team from Brazil of Larissa Franca and Talita Antunes, but U.S. women have won every beach volleyball competition since it was introduced at the 1996 Atlanta Games.

It is not difficult to connect the evolution in the success of American women in Olympic competition to the landmark passage of Title IX by Congress in 1972.

At the 1972 Munich Olympics, only 90 of the more than 400 athletes that represented the USA were women. By the 1996 Games in Atlanta, the number of female athletes had more than tripled, to 277.

Title IX blew the door open for American girls to compete in high school and collegiate athletics with equal training and financial support. It also forced colleges to create more women's varsity sports teams to meet scholarship equality.

A big-time college football program also meant more scholarships for women in sports such as track, soccer, swimming and volleyball.

America also has evolved faster than many nations in giving respect to women's sports. Parents want those athletic scholarships for their daughters as much as for their sons.

The difference is that there are a wider variety of sports for girls to choose from.

The net effect for the U.S. women's Olympic program has been that it gets more of the elite athletes spread out among a greater variety of sports.

Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the International Olympic Committee in 1894, once said, "An Olympiad with females would be impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper."

Now, 120 years after the first modern Games, the United States knows female athletes are a formula for success.

@SmallTerp