Pack of the Day 140: 2016 Topps U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Team Hopefuls Blaster Box

I saw quite a few cool cards posted by people breaking the 2016 Topps U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Team Hopefuls product, so I though I'd take a chance on a blaster box and see if I could pull something neat.

A blaster contains 7 packs + 1 extra pack 8 packs of cards, with I think 10 cards per pack. Missy Franklin was the cover star for the product. She won several medals in the 2012 Olympics, but struggled for the 2016 games and came away with a team Gold for swimming in the heats leading up to the Women's 4 x 200m Freestyle Relay final.

Obviously most of the cards in the box came from the base set. I thought this base card for Melissa Stockwell featured an interesting fact, mentioning that she was the first female American soldier to lose a limb in active combat. I feel kind of bad because Olympic fever seems to have moved on into football fever, and when I went to see how she did in Rio I learned that the Paralympic games only started a couple of days ago and her event isn't for another couple of days still. Update 9/11/2016: She took Bronze as part of a U.S. sweep of the podium.

For the base card scans in this post I tried to pick a mixture of cards to show off, including some of the big names that get a lot of media attention and also some of the less-publicized athletes and events.

Ryan Lochte was probably one of the bigger stories at the Olympics this year, and not in a good way. The Women's Gymnastics team was one of the better feel-good stories of the games, but even they got some negative press over what I thought were pretty trivial things.

The set's parallels follow the Bronze, Silver, and Gold theme. I got eight Bronze parallels, or one per pack.

Four Silver parallels came out of the box. I don't have a whole lot to say about them, to be honest.

The box also contained two Gold parallels, featuring athletes that I also pulled Bronze parallels for.

The Olympic Disciplines insert falls 1:4 packs, so I got two of them. The sports highlighted on my cards are Rugby and Field Hockey.

This last insert is a Closing Ceremonies card, which is a 1:24 pack pull according to the odds on the box.

And that's about it. I didn't pull any relics, autos, manu-patches, or manu-medals. I guess not everyone can be a winner, just like in the Olympics. I wouldn't mind chasing down more of these cards, but seeing as how many of the autographs in this set sell for under ten dollars, I might just grab a couple of them on the secondary market. Sorry this post is pretty light on content. I don't have a lot to say today.