Argentina reach 1st men's field hockey final beating champs
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) - Argentina is in another Olympic field hockey final.
It's just not the team their deliriously happy compatriots thought would be playing for a gold medal.
Los Leones, the Lions, thrashed defending two-time champion Germany 5-2 on Tuesday to reach their first Olympic final and step out of the shadow of their much more illustrious women's team, Las Leonas, the Lionesses.
The women lost their quarterfinal late Monday, ensuring they won't medal for the first time in 20 years.
But 14 hours later the men's team used their first semifinal appearance in 11 Olympics to showcase their transformation and potential, emphatically ending the reign of the 2008 and 2012 champion.
The Leones will play either Netherlands or Belgium for the gold on Thursday.
"This is crazy," midfielder Lucas Rey said. "We knew we could do this, but it's still crazy."
They scored off their first three penalty corners, all hit by Gonzalo Peillat on the stick side of Germany goalkeeper Nicolas Jacobi, inside the first half. Also incredibly, Germany was restricted to two shots in the whole half.
After the interval, Joaquin Menini and Lucas Vila extended Argentina's lead to 5-0 with less than a quarter left. That's when Germany replaced its goalie for an extra forward to try and limit the humiliation.
The Germans rode an amazing streak of luck from scoring in the last 8 seconds of three games, including forcing a 4-4 draw with Argentina in pool play last Thursday. But even though they came back furiously with a penalty stroke goal by captain Moritz Furste, who failed on all five of his penalty corners, and a Christopher Ruhr goal, there was no chance of another miracle comeback with the mood the Argentines are in.
Even as the score mounted, Menini said their prime thought was not, "We're smashing Germany by a record score," but more, "Don't lose this."
"Every time we started from the middle line, we said the score was zero-zero, that we had to keep on playing, keep on defending," Menini added.
Paillet, the expert drag-flicker who has converted a remarkable 10 of his 36 chances in these games, said, "Germany always plays to the last seconds. We couldn't stop and congratulate ourselves."
Not until the last minute did Argentina coach Carlos Retegui, responsible for many of the women's triumphs, finally accept he'd masterminded the men's biggest success yet, and began hugging his assistants. Seconds later, the players were hugging and group hopping all over the Olympic Hockey Stadium, too, roared on by hundreds of fans.
The men's team has come on in the last three years, thanks to five veterans with more than 200 caps, including goalie Juan Vivaldi, who made 10 saves, and relative newcomers Peillat, who draws all the attention with his penalty shots, and Menini. They were third at the 2014 World Cup, which was their best ever achievement until these games.
Germany bombed at the World Cup, but still had a core of seven players from the 2012 champion side. They lived dangerously here, and the great Furste admitted they didn't play their best in the semis. Midfielder Tobias Hauke, another two-time gold medalist, looked forward to redemption in the bronze-medal game.
"It's good that we had the early game (today)," Hauke said, "because now we have a chance to be angry with ourselves for a few hours."