Rio Olympics 2016: Team USA closing in on incredible 1,000th gold medal… Or is it No999
THE UNITED STATES are set to bag their 1,000th Olympic gold medal during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
But no-one knows exactly when... It's not that they're unsure where they're next top gongs are coming from, the issue stems from an historical debate still raging over a century on.
Following Team USA's stunning start to these Games - predominantly in the swimming pool thanks to Michael Phelps - the US Olympic Committee are planning a major party when they reach 1,000 golds.
However, when scouring the archives to find exactly how many golds they started the 2016 Olympics on, they found conflicting accounts.
So when the famous No1,000 pops up - it could in fact only be 999... Or even 1,001.
The issue started when a leading Olympic historian - Bill Mallon - claimed the US had won 975 going into the Rio edition.
However, he quickly found international sports statistics conglomerate - Gracenote - had them down as winning 977 golds.
After emails back and forth between the two parties it turned out the issue transports us all the way back to the 1904 Games in St Louis.
The culprit? One Julius Lenhart of Austria... Or is that America?
To understand the confusion, it's important to look back at the farce that was the 1904 Olympics.
First of all, they were supposed to take place in Chicago, before being moved to St Louis as the city was hosting the World's Fair that year.
That meant, that rather than a month of stellar sporting action, the events sporadically took place over the space of FIVE months.
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Back then, athletes weren't representing their country either, they played for their respective clubs - who in turn represented the nation.
For instance, the US managed to win gold, silver and bronze in the water polo as the New York Athletic Association, Chicago Athletic Club and Missouri Athletic Club came first, second and third respectively.
The US won 239 of the total 280 medals on offer in 1904, with European teams not taking on the cost and stress of the long trip across the Atlantic.
So, where's the problem with Lenhart? Well, the Austrian won two gold medals at the Games competing for the US as he was part of Philadelphia club Turngemeinde.
The golds were accepted as a double-win for the US until the 1970s, when an Austrian researcher cleared up the origin of Lenhart and claimed the gongs for his nation, thus stripping the US of two of their golds.
Yet, later the gold suddenly was dubbed 'mixed', meaning it could not count towards America or Austria's total medal count.
So back to the present, and Mallon and Gracenote seem to have reached an impasse.
Mallon insists 976 is correct, Gracenote won't budge on 978.
Yet the USOC are begging their two parties to find a resolution, claiming: "We didn’t want to have to tell some guy he was the 1,000th gold medal winner and then have everyone come back and say he wasn’t."
In a bid to find a compromise, Mallon said Lenhart's TEAM gold - of which he was one of six, with the other five all American natives - should stand.
His individual however, shouldn't, according to the historian.
So therein lies the issue... When the US reach the magic 1,000 mark they may indeed have won 1,000 Olympic golds.
That said, it could be 999... Or 1,001. Perhaps we'll never know for sure. After all, Lenhart died in Vienna in 1962, with no idea the controversy his double-gold win over a century had caused.