The United States girls’s water polo staff will launch their bid for an unprecedented fourth straight Olympic gold medal on Saturday with an unlikely benefactor of their nook. Taste Flav, the 65-year-old founding member of Public Enemy, has stolen the present round city in his function because the staff’s official hype man.
“That is fairly an expertise for me proper now, you understand, as a result of the one time I’ve ever seen the Olympics was on TV,” mentioned Flav, who spent Thursday hugging and high-fiving everybody in sight on the Workforce USA home within the historic Palais Brongniart. “You realize what I’m saying? However I at all times needed to see what it felt like being there.”
The unbelievable partnership was fashioned in Could when staff captain Maggie Steffens put out a name on Instagram asking for monetary assist. That’s when Flav – whose authorized title is William Jonathan Drayton Jr – supplied to again the staff whereas leveraging his superstar to deliver consideration to one of the vital profitable and ignored groups on the Olympic scene.
“As a woman dad and supporter of all girls’s sports activities – imma personally sponsor you my lady, no matter you want. And imma sponsor the entire staff,” Flav wrote again.
A couple of weeks later, Flav signed a five-year sponsorship deal with the US girls’s and males’s groups aimed to “elevate the visibility and pleasure surrounding water polo in america”. Along with an undisclosed monetary contribution, Flav will make a number of appearances at USA Water Polo occasions to deliver consideration to a sport that has bother drawing stateside consideration even through the Olympics.
“I’ve been actually empowered by different girls in sports activities to make use of your voice, which generally is a little scary at occasions,” mentioned Steffens. “And I used to be calling for folks to know my teammates and difficult them and empowering them to comply with a number of the extra area of interest sports activities this Olympics, particularly girls’s.
“And Taste Flav noticed that and one thing about it sparked his curiosity … He has actually opened the door for folks to find out about our staff and totally different communities, totally different individuals who would have by no means heard of water polo.”
Success has by no means been the US girls’s staff’s downside. Three years in the past in Tokyo, they turned the third nation to win three consecutive Olympic water polo titles. Arguably essentially the most dominant staff in world sport at the moment, the American are hotly tipped to make it 4 on the trot in Paris, the place they open on Saturday in opposition to Greece.
Flav’s help of the US staff has gone past monetary backing. When Steffens and Co visited Paris for a take a look at occasion in Could on the similar time Taylor Swift introduced her Eras Tour to La Défense Enviornment, Flav labored trade backchannels to nail down tickets for your complete staff.
Since touchdown in Paris, Flav has excelled in his function. He’s been ubiquitous round city, simply recognizable in a Workforce USA jersey, swim cap and a customized USA Water Polo clock round his neck (waterproof, in fact), even conducting a half-hour information convention on the major press heart on Friday morning.
“That is an honor, and this can be a pleasure and an ideal measure – and I’m gonna preserve this reminiscence as an ideal treasure,” he mentioned.
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Final month Flav jumped into the pool with the ladies’s staff for a video that has been seen thousands and thousands of occasions throughout Instagram and TikTok, even scoring a purpose previous star goaltender Ashleigh Johnson. “I lately bought within the pool and bought to learn the way troublesome water polo is,” he mentioned. “I inform all people I used to be within the water for seven minutes, treading water for seven minutes, and boy that was the toughest seven minutes of my life! However the women mentioned I did good.”
To name it an unlikely marriage could be an understatement. When he wasn’t delivering barbed polemic on 911 Is a Joke or taking down America’s sacred cows on Struggle the Energy, Flav was ceaselessly at odds with the regulation. The rapper spent 9 weeks in jail in 2002 for a number of driving and probation offences and he was arrested in 2011 over assorted excellent driving offences. There have additionally been different expenses associated to home violence and drug possession.
It’s not the apparent pairing for an Olympic partnership, the place multinationals like Coca-Cola and Intel sometimes rule the roost. And but … all styles and sizes. Flav’s sincerity in fostering excellence in girls’s sports activities, a healthful endeavour on full view in Paris, seems real.
“When these women aren’t within the water, they’re residence residing lively lives … working two or three jobs. It takes time to get a gold medal,” he mentioned on Friday. “Everyone needs to really feel like they bought their again coated, like anyone has their again. After they really feel that, it makes them really feel extra highly effective, it makes them really feel extra higher. It provides them much more power to exit and get that fourth gold medal.”