Their friendship apparently first started at a pre-games camp last month when Bryant turned up to an Aussie swim training session the morning after Rice and teammates had attended his Dream Team game the night before. Swapping tokens of their friendship, he left with a signed swimming cap for his daughter (an avid Rice fan, which, really, is hard to believe) and she with a signed pair of shoes.
Rice’s rep has vehemently denied any romantic link between the duo but that hasn’t stopped both from trending on Twitter before, during and after The Dream Team’s 119-86 defeat of The Boomers in the men’s basketball quarter-finals in London this morning. It also hasn’t stopped other athletes from dousing them in haterade…
Opals center Elizabeth Cambage – the first woman in Oympics history to successfully posterize someone – directed a thinly veiled tweet at Rice, telling her to “get a grip”, not of The Black Mamba’s Black Mamba, but on a better sense of decorum considering Bryant’s estranged wife Vanessa and children were also in attendance in London.
Cambage’s tweet was later followed by claims from Australian Olympic swimmer Craig Stevens that a relationship between the pair had started as far back as Beijing ’08.
“There’s definitely something going on,” he told Triple M this morning. “I was on the last Olympic team and he was hanging us a fair bit at the different parties and whatnot.”
“I remember her telling the story [of] how he put it to her. That he had the family coming the next day but he had that night free.”
Neither is yet to publicly comment on their relationship but Rice had this to say about an hour ago…
