If U.S. men’s soccer coach Bob Bradley has Freddy Adu available, why not play him in one of his team’s most important – and historic – games in recent memory?

The explosive attacker will not dress Saturday when the No. 28 Americans, coming off a pool-play exit at the Beijing Games, travel to Cuba for the first time in 61 years, for a 2010 World Cup qualifier.

Six players who competed last month in Beijing – goalkeeper Brad Guzan, midfielders Michael Bradley, Maurice Edu and Sacha Kljestan and defenders Michael Orozco and Marvell Wynne – are part of the 20-person roster.

Omissions were Adu, 19, playing for French club AS Monaco on a season-long loan from Portuguese club SL Benfica, and Jozy Altidore, 18, playing for Spanish club Villarreal CF, which bought his rights from the New York Red Bulls of Major League Soccer.

“Many different factors get weighed when you put a roster together,” Bradley said Thursday on a conference call with reporters. “We weigh different factors – where a player is in his season, in his club, how much he has played lately.”

Pressed on Adu’s exclusion, Bradley said, “I don’t typically comment on individuals in terms of why they are not selected. … Freddy is a young player that has been part of our pool, will continue to be. And we’ll continue to assess how he’s playing and where he fits for every camp and game.”

The U.S. beat Guatemala 1-0 last month in its opener of the World Cup qualifying semifinal round. It will play a home-and-home series with Cuba, ranked 92nd in the world, and Trinidad and Tobago, ranked 80th, and a Nov. 19 game against Guatemala, ranked 99th, in Commerce City.

Coronado High School graduate Henry Cejudo appeared on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” on Wednesday, flaunting the gold medal he won in freestyle wrestling at the Beijing Games.

Check out the episode … http://www.nbc.com/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno/video/episodes/?vid=535461

BEIJING – You can knock Jayson Nix down, but you can’t knock him out.

The Colorado Springs Sky Sox second baseman returned to the U.S. baseball team Saturday for an 8-4 win over Japan in the Olympic bronze-medal game, eight days after bunting a ball into his face.

Nix, 25, went 1 for 4 with a single and a walk, scoring in a three-run third inning. He made several sound defensive plays – a stretch far to his right for a groundball in the second and the turn of double plays in the fifth and the eighth.

U.S. Olympic Committee chief medical officer William Kuprevich said last week Nix wouldn’t play again in the Beijing Games following microsurgery for multiple lacerations on his left eyebrow.

Swelling on his forehead, coupled with his eye being dilated, caused Nix to miss six games – wins over Canada, China, Japan, Netherlands and Taiwan in pool play and a 10-2 loss to Cuba in Friday’s semifinals.

He took batting practice Thursday and fielded groundballs Friday, showing no signs of fatigue from a brief stay at a Beijing hospital, where he underwent a CT scan and an eye exam in addition to surgery.

“I was glad I was able to get back out there,” said Nix, sporting a shiner under his eye and a handful of stitches on his eyebrow from the high, tight pitch that took an awkward bounce off his bat Aug. 15 in the 11th inning of a 5-4 setback against Cuba.

BEIJING – Two terrible shots made her grimace. One tight swimsuit left her in tears. Twenty fencing losses nearly jolted her to the exits.

On the big stage, Margaux Isaksen resembled a wide-eyed teenager.

The Olympic Training Center resident buckled under pressure in a shaky start and couldn’t recover for a strong enough finish Friday in the women’s modern pentathlon competition at the Beijing Games.

Isaksen, 16, amassed 5,292 points for 21st place in the 36-person event that combines shooting, fencing, swimming, equestrian and running. Former OTC resident Sheila Taormina had 5,304 points for 19th in her third Olympics.

German Lena Schoneborn won the gold medal with 5,792 points. Great Britain’s Heather Fell (5,752) claimed silver, and Ukraine’s Victoria Tereshuk (5,672) took bronze.

A pair of 6s – on a 10-point scale – negated three perfect shots for Isaksen in 10-meter air pistol, where competitors aim at bull’s-eyes 10.4 millimeters in diameter, smaller than a dime.

In the 200 freestyle swim, Isaksen finished in 2 minutes, 20.30 seconds, about 4 seconds slower than her average, hampered by a Speedo suit that affected her stroke and limited her mobility.

Isaksen said she wanted to “pack up and go home” midway through epee one touch, her weakest discipline. She went 15-20, losing 312 points on Schoneborn, the first-place finisher.

By the time Isaksen rewarded her horse with a kiss for helping her to a 10th-place finish in show jumping and completed the 3,000 run in 10:40.41, she had fallen out of contention, way behind the lead pack.

“My first three events were awfully depressing,” said Isaksen, among the youngest of the 596 U.S. athletes in Beijing. “I didn’t really know what to expect.”

BEIJING – Colorado Springs residents Eli Bremer and Sam Sacksen struggled Thursday in the men’s modern pentathlon competition at the Beijing Games.

Sacksen, 22, finished 18th after taking seventh in equestrian show jumping, 17th in running, 23rd in shooting, 25th in swimming and 30th in fencing. Bremer, 30, finished 23rd after placing seventh in running and swimming, 14th in show jumping, 30th in fencing and 34th in shooting.

Russian Andrey Moiseev won the gold medal. Lithuanians Edvinas Krungolcas and Andrejus Zadneprovskis were the silver and bronze medalists.

Colorado Springs resident Margaux Isaksen will compete Friday in the women’s event. Last year, Isaksen won the youth, junior and senior national championships and a gold at the South American Modern Pentathlon Championships.

BEIJING – The “adopted Lopez” apparently doesn’t receive star treatment like America’s first family of taekwondo.

A late rally in which she might have scored several points Wednesday wasn’t enough to save Charlotte Craig in a 3-2 loss to Venezuelan Dalia Contreras Rivero in the 108-pound flyweight quarterfinals at the Beijing Games.

The youngest of 16 flyweight competitors, Craig, 17, got no points from a four-person judging panel in the third period despite twice unloading a flurry of kicks in the corners and a punishing face shot at the buzzer.

“A loss is a loss either way,” Craig said after Rivero’s setback against Thailand’s Buttree Puedpong knocked her out of bronze-medal contention. “I think it would hurt the same. I’m just happy that I got a chance to represent my country.”

Most called Craig the undercard to Steven, Mark and Diana Lopez, the first set of three American siblings to make the same Summer Games in the same sport since gymnastics brothers Edward, Richard and William Tritschler appeared in the 1904 Olympics.

Their older brother, Jean, coaches all of them – Steven a two-time Olympic gold medalist and four-time world champion; Mark a three-time world medalist; and Diana a two-time world medalist. Mark and Diana compete today, and Steven fights Friday.

“We’re like one big family,” Craig said. “We always kid around and say I’m the adopted Lopez. They always treat me like I’m their younger sister. I just love their support.”

BEIJING – Former Coronado High School state champion wrestler Henry Cejudo won a gold medal Tuesday in the 121-pound men’s freestyle division at the Beijing Games.

Cejudo, 21, scored a 2-2, 3-0 decision over Japan’s Tomohiro Matsunaga in the gold-medal match after victories against Bulgarian Radoslav Velikov, Georgia’s Besarion Gochashvili and Azerbaijan’s Namig Sevdimov.

The gold nets Cejudo $65,000 in contractual bonuses – $25,000 from both USA Wrestling and the U.S. Olympic Committee and $15,000 from a fund by wrestling enthusiast Ken Honig.

The son of former Mexican illegal immigrants, Cejudo has lived at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs the past five years. He claimed two state titles at Coronado after winning a pair at a Phoenix high school.

BEIJING – There are no ties in Olympic gymnastics.

Nastia Liukin learned the hard way Monday in the uneven bars final of the Beijing Games, losing a gold-medal tiebreaker to China’s He Kexin before admissions of confusion over rules, allegations of unfair judging and questions about gymnasts’ ages.

Neither Liukin, 18, of Plano, Texas, nor He, 16, knew the gold medalist when they posted 16.725 scores with high-flying routines. Ditto for Liukin’s father and coach, Valeri, and 18,000 fans, most waving Chinese flags and screaming at the top of their lungs.

Only after the last gymnast in the eight-person final performed did the public-address announcer declare He the winner of the complicated tiebreaker, determined by a computation of the averages of six judges’ scores.

“It wasn’t that I got second by three- or five-tenths,” Liukin said. “I had the same exact score, and that’s what makes it a little bit harder to take. Unfortunately, you can’t control the judges. After you land the dismount, it’s all up to them.”The tiebreaker went to He by 0.33 of a point because she had a lower average of form deductions on her routine. The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) used its second tiebreaker, taking the average of the three lowest deductions of the four possible.

Contrary to in-arena talk, FIG didn’t factor start values – the degree of difficultly for a gymnast’s routine – into the tiebreaker. Liukin and He both had 7.7 start values.

BEIJING – In a stunningly similar collapse, the final shot doomed Matt Emmons again.

The Olympic Training Center shooter gave away a gold medal Sunday in 50-meter rifle 3-position at the Beijing Games, four years after he lost gold in the same event by firing at the wrong target.

Emmons, 27, led by 3.3 points after a 120-shot qualification round and nine attempts in a 10-shot final when he pulled the trigger too early on his last shot, causing it to nearly miss the target.

The bullet grazed the upper part of the target for a 4.4, and Emmons dropped to fourth as pandemonium erupted for a 10.0 that provided Qiu Jian of China with the gold. Jury Sukhorukov of the Ukraine was the silver medalist, and Slovenia’s Rajmond Debevec finished 1.4 points ahead of Emmons for bronze.

“If it’s something this crazy, there has to be a good reason for it,” said Emmons, who won a silver Friday in rifle prone. “For a crazy thing like that to happen two times in a row, there has got to be something. And I’m sure it will show itself with time.”

BEIJING – An unfamiliar grimace shot across Clarissa Chun’s face as Canadian Carol Huynh flashed her Olympic gold medal on the podium.

“I was going to kiss the medal if I got that gold,” Chun said. “Everyone bites it. I was going to make out with mine.”

The Olympic Training Center wrestler never got the chance Saturday at the Beijing Games, pinned by Ukrainian Irini Merleni in the bronze-medal match of the 105.5-pound women’s freestyle division.

Chun, 26, was overpowered against Merleni, a 2004 Olympic gold medalist and three-time world champion, after a 2-1, 4-1 victory over Sweden’s Sofia Mattsson, a 6-1, 2-1 win over France’s Vanessa Boubryemm and a 1-0, 0-3, 1-1 loss to Japan’s Chiharu Icho.

She bemoaned technical mistakes in the second Olympic women’s wrestling tournament, won by Huynh, with Icho the silver medalist and Merleni and Azerbaijan’s Mariya Stadnik taking bronzes.

“I feel like I could have done more,” said Chun, her red eyes again welling with tears. “I feel like I didn’t lay it all out there completely. I felt like I tried. But when I tried, I was like one step behind.”