It’s been 19 years since the 2000 Olympic USA basketball team went undefeated en route to a gold medal in Sydney, and Vince Carter’s epic dunk over French center Frederic Weis is still talked about as one of the best in-game dunks ever.
The dunk just wasn’t worthy of the team’s $1 million bet.
Kevin Garnett spoke to Yahoo! Sports about Carter’s dunk over Weis, and that was when he revealed that the Olympic team had a bounty for a posterizing dunk … it just had to be on China’s Yao Ming.
Garnett said via Yahoo:
“Everything just paused. First of all, people didn’t know, we had a bounty out on Yao Ming. The whole USA team had a bet. We had a million dollar bet on who was going to be the first person to dunk on Yao Ming. None of us did. We all tried to dunk on Yao, but he would block it or we would miss.
“So, the first thing I thought of when I saw Vince dunk over Frederic was oh (expletive), you won the million dollars. But then I realized it obviously wasn’t Yao. I pushed Vince, and if you look at the clip, he almost punches me in the face by accident. But my first thought was, oh (expletive), you won, you got the million.”
Yao Ming hadn’t even made his NBA debut at the time, but the USA team still identified the 7-foot-6 center as their primary target. You have to respect that Team USA picked out the tallest dude out there and said, “A million bucks to whoever dunks on him.”
That’s the confidence that was missing from Team USA in 2004.
The best part was that Carter jumped over a 7-foot-2 Weis, and it wasn’t worth anything in the eyes of his teammates (outside of Garnett). It was Yao or nothing, and Yao held his own. Nobody dunked on him.
