By Mike Lopresti
Gannett News Service

The status of U.S. men's Olympic soccer today? Only one word comes to mind.

Ole!

The Americans will not be in Athens. They were, you probably noticed, blown out of the qualifying tournament by the team from Mexico, and 60,000 hooting, whistling, taunting, chanting faithful in Guadalajara.

The result was 4-0, which translates to a Duke basketball score against Fairfield. Not that we're here to pick on soccer. The same thing happened to the baseball team. Evicted by Mexico. Thereby freeing up Roger Clemens, who wanted a go at Cuba, to instead unretire and pitch for the Houston Astros. The American national pastime will be played in the Olympics by, among others, the teams from Australia and the Netherlands.

The size of the Yank contingent marching in the opening ceremony seems to be getting smaller by the loss to Mexico.

While we're at it, a potential drug scandal involving the steroid flavor of the month, THG, still percolates in the general vicinity of USA track and field.

Then there's basketball. The owner of the Dallas Mavericks has been trading public verbal hand grenades with the Olympic coach over whether the NBA should even be allowing its players to participate.

Mark Cuban wants his pricey employees kept safe for a run at Sacramento, rather than chancing a blown-out knee trying to beat Argentina.

Alas, those heady and happy days of the Dream Team were a long time ago, in another century.

"I prefer that if you have a contract you make a choice," Cuban said the other day.

Not so, Larry Brown countered, reminding Cuban that it was NBA's splashdown in the Olympics that flamed worldwide passion in basketball, with the result a steady flow of international talent onto NBA rosters.

The two have gone back and forth from there, Cuban annoying Brown almost as much as he annoys David Stern. Though Brown's point seems particularly valid in any debate with Cuban, whose Dallas locker room includes a center from Mexico, guards from Canada and Iceland, and forwards from Germany and France.

Pride once led to the Dream Team. But Mark Cuban wants us to return to the motive we know best. Money.

Have we spotted a trend in all the above? Sure. The run-up to Athens has not been all peaches and cream lately for the USA.

By all reports, the American soccer team had to endure blistering hostility in its game against Mexico. Whistles during the national anthem. Heckling at their names. And then the chants of "Osama! Osama!"

Suffice it to say, Osama is not the name of the Mexican goalie.

Part of this, no doubt, was the usual soccer fervor.

But one also wonders if this is a preview to the summer. We don't seem to be real popular at the moment.

And Greece has never ranked in the top five in the BCS rankings of the American chum list, anyway. American athletes can probably rule out being the people's choice in Athens. They weren't by a country kilometer in Sydney, and that was even before the Iraq business.

The guess here is American teams can count on hisses this summer. Whistles. Catcalls. Boos. Antagonism. Resentment.

But not in baseball or men's soccer.