Sports

Solo won’t be punished for her Twitter rant

Hope Solo met with the coach and captains of the U.S. women’s soccer team yesterday to discuss her latest outburst of candor, a Twitter rant that did no good for the image of the squad and distracted from preparations for the upcoming game against North Korea in the Olympic tournament.

Coach Pia Sundhage said Solo will not be disciplined for the series of tweets that criticized former U.S. player Brandi Chastain’s commentary during the NBC broadcast of the Americans’ 3-0 win over Colombia on Saturday.

“We had a conversation: If you look at the women’s national team, what do you want [people] to see? What do you want them to hear?” Sundhage told reporters at the team hotel. “And that’s where we do have a choice — as players, coaches, staff, the way we respond to certain things.”

Solo rattled off four tweets following Saturday’s game, upset over Chastain’s criticisms of the team’s defensive play.

“Its 2 bad we cant have commentators who better represents the team&knows more about the game,” tweeted Solo. She also told Chastain to “lay off commentating about defending” and goalkeeping “until you get more educated” and “the game has changed from a decade ago.”

POST’S OLYMPIC COVERAGE

The meeting with Solo took place after the team arrived in Manchester, where the Americans (2-0) will play the North Koreans tomorrow in a game that will determine pairings for the quarterfinals.

The team said Solo will be available for comment today, following a walkthrough at Old Trafford. She did take to Twitter again yesterday, however, to respond to a reporter’s tweet that she wouldn’t be disciplined.

“discipline? Ha! For what! Never even a topic! We talked about our team deserving the best!” she tweeted.

* U.S. beach volleyball tandem Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor play the last night match tonight — their second consecutive 11 p.m. (local time) court date.

“I was worried,” Walsh Jennings said after winning her opener against Australia. “At home, it hits 11 and I’m a zombie. But we could play at 4 in the morning, we don’t care.”

Defending men’s champions Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser won their opener, improving the United States to 4-0 in the tournament.

* Spain suffered a rare soccer setback, going out of the men’s Olympic tournament yesterday after losing 1-0 to Honduras. Spain was looking to add an Olympic gold to the World Cup and European Championship titles held by the country’s full national team.

In the second round of group matches, host Britain got its campaign back on track with a 3-1 victory over United Arab Emirates.

Brazil and Japan booked their places in the quarterfinals with victories.

* Abby Johnston and Kelci Bryant finished second in 3-meter synchronized women’s diving, ending the United States’ diving medal drought that extended to the 2000 Sydney Games. It was the first Olympic synchro medal for the Americans.

* Zara Phillips did her royal family proud.

The granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II, 14th in line to the British throne, wowed the home crowd and a few relatives — including her grandfather, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and her mother, Princess Anne — in her Olympic equestrian debut, riding her appropriately named horse, High Kingdom, to a respectable finish in the eventing dressage competition.

The 31-year-old Phillips earned 46.1 penalty points at Greenwich Park, placing her 24th out of 74 riders with two disciplines to go.