Breakout Stars to Watch for at the 2016 Summer Olympics

With blazing speed and a compelling backstory, Team USA's Boris Berian is one of several athletes destined to become a breakout star at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympic Games.

To the people who religiously follow the sports on the following slides, calling these athletes "breakout stars" would be the equivalent of bestowing the same title upon MLB's Mike Trout or the NFL's Andrew Luck if either was to lead his team to a championship. Each has already proved himself or herself to be a star over the past several years.

But for the greater portion of the population that tunes in for the Summer Olympics and then willfully forgets for 47 months that sports such as gymnastics, swimming and track and field still exist, these athletes who have never won an Olympic medal will appear to come out of nowhere.

So get to know these rising stars. That way, when everyone else is blathering on about aging Olympic stars like the USA's Michael Phelps, Jamaica's Usain Bolt or Japan's Kohei Uchimura, you can drop some knowledge on these younger athletes and become the resident Olympics expert at your local hangout.

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Laurie Hernandez

Few Olympic events get as much fanfare as women's gymnastics. It has been 20 years since Kerri Strug stuck the vault landing on an injured ankle and was subsequently carried to the podium by coach Bela Karolyi, but it's still one of the most iconic images in Olympic history.

The event produces a new star for Team USA every four years. Nastia Liukin took the world by storm in 2008. Gabby Douglas followed suit in 2012 by winning gold in the all-around, and Team USA's Simone Biles is the overwhelming favorite to win that gold this year, having won it at three consecutive world championships.

But 16-year-old Laurie Hernandez is the one who will steal our hearts, playing the Shawn Johnson to Biles' Liukin.

Liukin won gold in the all-around in 2008, but it was 16-year-old Johnson who became the face of women's gymnastics for the next four years. And based on the fans chanting Hernandez's name before her floor routine at the second night of the women's U.S. trials in July, she is already well on her way to stardom.

"She's as captivating a presence as anyone in American gymnastics," wrote Katie Baker of The Ringer.

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Wayde van Niekerk

Half a decade ago, Wayde van Niekerk was a potential up-and-comer in the 200 meters. He placed fourth in the event at the 2010 World Junior Championships before eventually realizing he was even better at the 400 meters.

At the 2015 World Championships in Beijing, Van Niekerk won gold in the 400 meters with a time of 43.48 seconds—his personal best and only three-tenths of a second behind Michael Johnson's world record. In those finals, he beat the USA's LaShawn Merritt (2008 gold medalist) and Grenada's Kirani James (2012 gold medalist), making him the favorite to win gold in 2016.

According to the BBC, Van Niekerk also ran a 9.98-second 100-meter dash this past March, becoming the first person ever to run the 100 meters in under 10 seconds, the 200 in under 20 seconds (19.94) and the 400 in under 44 seconds.

He will be South Africa's flag-bearer during the opening ceremony and the country's best chance for a gold medal in 2016. And at just 24 years of age, that might be the case in 2020 and 2024 as well.

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Sarah Sjöström

For Sarah Sjostrom, the breakout party was supposed to come during the 2012 Olympics. She reached the semifinals of the 50-meter freestyle, 100-meter free and 200-meter free, and she finished fourth in the 100-meter butterfly, missing a medal by just 0.23 seconds.

Since the beginning of 2013, though, Sjostrom has amassed 33 medals between the FINA World Championships and European Aquatics Championships.

At the 2015 World Championships in Kazan, Russia, Sjostrom won gold in the 50-meter fly and 100-meter fly, took silver in the 100-meter free and 4x100-meter medley, and earned a bronze in the 50-meter free. At the 2016 European Championships in London, she took home three golds and a bronze.

USA's Katie Ledecky is likely going to win the most gold medals of any swimmer this year, but she is a distance swimmer, while Sjostrom specializes in the shorter events.

Rather, the biggest threat to Sjostrom in Rio is an up-and-comer from Down Under...

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Bronte Campbell

Sarah Sjostrom will likely win gold in the 100-meter fly, but if she comes up short in the freestyle sprints, it will probably be because she can't keep up with Australia's Bronte Campbell.

Campbell won gold in the 50-meter free, 100-meter free and 4x100-meter free in Kazan last August, blossoming into a dominant force as a sprint swimmer over the past two years.

Campbell reached the semifinals of the 50-meter free at the 2012 Olympics, but she barely missed qualifying for the finals.

She gets bonus consideration as a breakout star because she will be competing in four events both with and against her older sister, Cate, who was part of the gold-medal-winning 4x100-meter free team in 2012. Should they both reach the finals of either the 50-meter free or 100-meter free, the palpable drama will write itself.

Madison Hughes

Along with golf, rugby sevens is a new event in this year's Olympics. But unlike golf, most Americans don't know much about this game.

Well, here are the two things you need to know:

1. It's a lot like American football except they don't wear helmets and can only pass in laterals.

2. Madison Hughes is Team USA's best player, its captain and is the one primarily responsible for kicking for points.

Everything else you can figure out along the way, or you can just enjoy the spectacle without fully understanding it.

In a recent interview with Jason Devaney of Metro, Hughes summarized his sport: "The ball is gonna fly around, players will be running all over the place, and it'll all be over before you can process all the action."

With Hughes at the helm, the Men's Eagles Sevens have become a legitimate international contender. They won the 2015 London Sevens Cup before qualifying for the Olympics with an excellent showing in the 2015 NACRA Sevens Championships. New Zealand looks like the favorite to win gold, but Team USA has a good chance of at least medaling in the event.

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Brooke Henderson

The big story in the lead-up to Olympic golf has been the deluge of male stars choosing not to compete. While Jason Day, Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth are among those citing concerns about the Zika virus as their reasons for not participating, one can hardly blame them for not wanting to add what amounts to a fifth major to their more-condensed-than-usual schedules.

The big golf story after the Olympics should be the continued surge of 18-year-old Canadian Brooke Henderson.

Henderson is No. 3 in the Women's World Golf Rankings. She won the Women's PGA Championship in June, becoming the second-youngest woman to ever win a LPGA major and the first Canadian to win one since Sandra Post in 1968.

But she's still just getting started, and an Olympic gold medal—in what is golf's first appearance in the Olympics since 1904—would be another big boost to her career. And it would be even better if it comes down to a battle between Henderson and Lydia Ko, the 19-year-old who is No. 1 in the world rankings. Viewership for women's golf outside of the Olympics would likely benefit from more exposure to that rivalry.

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Adam Peaty

In a recent piece predicting which countries would win the most medals in Rio, I noted that swimming has been one of Great Britain's biggest weaknesses in recent Olympics. It won a combined total of just nine medals at the 2008 and 2012 Games. To put that number in context, Team USA won 31 swimming medals just in 2012, while three other countries racked up at least 10 swimming medals in London.

But Great Britain's Adam Peaty has emerged as the king of the breaststroke over the past two years.

Between the World Championships in 2014 and 2015, the European Championships from 2014-16 and the Commonwealth Games in 2014, Peaty has won 13 gold and six silver medals. In the 2015 World Championships in Kazan, he took gold in the 50-meter breaststroke, 100-meter breaststroke and the 4x100-meter mixed medley.

The 21-year-old currently holds the world record in both the 50-meter breaststroke (26.42 seconds) and the 100-meter breaststroke (57.92 seconds) and will enter the 2016 Olympics as the overwhelming favorite in both events.

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Dafne Schippers

Dafne Schippers used to specialize in the women's heptathlon, winning gold in that event at both the World Junior Championships and European Junior Championships. She also earned the bronze medal for the heptathlon at the 2013 World Championships in Moscow.

But she was consistently so far ahead of her competition during the 200-meter portion of the seven-leg event that she opted to drop everything else just to focus on sprinting.

Schippers clearly made the right call, winning gold in the 200 and silver in the 100 at the 2015 World Championships in Beijing.

Even if she doesn't win gold in either event, Schippers will be looking to break up the duopoly Jamaica and the USA have held on the women's 100 and 200 at the Olympics. In each event in both 2008 and 2012, those two countries claimed every gold, silver and bronze medal.

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Rags to riches is the American dream, but what about golden arches to gold medals?

That's the goal for Boris Berian.

According to Jere Longman of the New York Times, Berian dropped out of college in May 2014 due to poor grades and began spending his days working at McDonald's while his nights consisted of training by himself before crashing on a friend's couch.

Fast-forward 22 months to this past March, and Berian won a gold medal in the 800 meters at the 2016 IAAF World Indoor Championships in Portland, Oregon. And at the U.S. Olympic trials in Eugene, Oregon, in July, Berian had the fastest qualifying time and fastest semifinal time before coming in second place in the finals to qualify for the 2016 Games in Rio.

Adding to his allure as someone who beat the odds, Berian fought a lawsuit against Nike, which attempted to sue him for breach of contract when he began running in New Balance shoes. His deal with Nike ended Dec. 31, 2015, but according to Laura Lorenzetti of Fortune magazine, there was a clause that allowed Nike to match any competing offer made within 180 days of the end of the contract.

Though the face value of Nike's offer matched the one from New Balance, Berian argued it wasn't actually a match because Nike's offer included "reduction clauses" if he didn't meet certain standards of excellence. After about a month of the public relations nightmare, Nike dropped the lawsuit, allowing the former fry cook to wear his shoes of choice in Rio.

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