*Beckham offers them tips

By Onochie Anibeze, reporting from London

  Kobe Bryant is clearly the richest athlete here in the London Olympics.

The American Basketball star is worth $30m a year. He earns just above $16m but rakes in above $18m on endorsements annually.  But he is humility personified.

He chooses to be ordinary here, very accessible, meeting people, chatting and only getting serious when in training. Few days after he reacted sharply to a question, his answer is still being discussed.

 “What would it be like if USA does not win the Basketball gold? As a sportsman will that be acceptable to you? Bryant jerked and for only that moment he chose not to be a sportsman who should accept victory or defeat in the spirit of sportsmanship.

“No, that’s not acceptable,” he said with authority in Manchester City where they trained and  security men tried to be overzealous in guarding the super star American team. But Bryant is always relaxed. The 12 players in US team are worth $160m dollars annually. And this is excluding money from commercials and endorsements. When you add other sources, the team may worth over $300m per a year. Could it be why the security men are all eyes on them?

“They may revoke our citizenship if we do not win the gold,” Bryant said, adding “we are going to play hard. When you have this kind of talent and we got here by hard work, the only thing we know how to do is to play hard.. For us it is either we win the gold or don’t come back. They might revoke our citizenship.”

People are still talking about this reaction from Bryant. It shows how hard they will really play. They have been dominating basketball in the Olympics but they won Bronze in Athens. However, they  returned to Beijing to win the gold. Bryant was in that team and says “there’s no honour more than representing your country in the Olympics. It’s stupid to suggest that the Olympics should be for Under 23s”

Bryant is a Man U fan and a friend of David Beckham who has helped him on how to cope with the British weather.