The Hindu : Sport / Olympic Games : Out to have fun

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Aug 19, 2004

Sport

Sport - Olympic Games

Out to have fun

By Jim White

Australia's Natalie Cook (left) and Nicole Sanderson are unhappy that their game is being demeaned. -- AP

ATHENS, AUG. 18. Two Australian beach volleyball players, Nicole Sanderson and Natalie Cook, have spent much of their first week at this Olympics complaining bitterly that the way the Greeks are presenting the competition demeans their sport. They may have a point.

Midway through the first set of a game on Tuesday between Greece and Brazil, the public address system was belting out a Euro pop song with the lyric `she's so sexy' while 10 leggy dancers in orange shrink-to-fit micro bikinis lined the sandy court, swinging their hips and pouting. And this happened just as Brazil's Sandra Pires appeared to serve.

Women's beach volleyball may have long been derided as not so much a sport as a casting session for Sports Illustrated magazine's annual swimwear edition, but this sort of thing doesn't happen at, say, Wimbledon. As yet, Lindsay Davenport has not been obliged to wait until a burst of Ozone's catchy hit Dragostae Din Tei finishes before she can serve for the match. Nor can you imagine the Centre Court umpires being serenaded out on to their high stools, as the officials were here, with a quick burst of the Village People.

Samba time

Not that the Olympic crowd seemed to share the Aussie pair's poker-faced critique. In the stadium, built where Athens' abandoned old dock area was decaying in the sun barely six months ago, a large, boisterous Brazilian fans could not have had more fun if Ronaldo was scoring a hat-trick to win the World Cup.

They kept up a continual wall of noise as their countrywomen Ana Paula Connely and Sandra Pires (who won the gold in Atlanta) recorded a two-set victory over Greece's Efthalia Koutroumanidou and Vasiliki Arvaniti in the competition's pool C. For once this was a Brazilian sporting crowd wearing rather more than the competitors.

At its heart was a plump, middle-aged male cheerleader, dressed in a Superman outfit and big, green Afro wig, choreographing every chant and dance. Near him was a cheery group of Scots waving a saltire and manfully failing quite to match Superman's samba beat. There are no Britons performing in the beach volleyball, but the number of enthusiastically waved Union Flags around the place, suggests, for some reason, there is a considerable interest in the sport back home.

Why no Britons play the game, when this Olympics features competitors from the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland, countries not renowned for their coastline, is hard to say. Perhaps it is because when we hit a warm, sandy stretch we prefer to lie back and work on our melanomas rather than whack a heavy ball with the palms of our hands. Besides, there isn't too much incentive to practice on Clacton Sands in January.

Whatever their nationality, there was not much interest during the morning session when a men's match involving two Austrian pairs had started proceedings in front of a crowd marginally smaller than the number of players on the court. But this is one of the few sports in which women performers attract more attention than their male counterparts. As soon as the women's competition began, and the athletes emerged in their minimalist outfits, the place started to fill. Particularly the photographers' pit.

Outstanding

If, when they are not squeezing into Superman outfits, Brazil's men folk are renowned for perfecting their football on Copacabana, clearly their women go there to play volleyball. Pires and Connely were outstanding on Tuesday.

Considerably older, wiser and more battle-hardened than their young Greek opponents, they galloped through to victory in less than 35 minutes.

Connely has the ability to hang in the air, like Denis Law in his prime, and pop deft little drop shots way out of reach of her opponents' extravagant dives. And when she chooses to hit the ball, it stays hit: she can serve at around 45mph.

And the Greek pair could barely read where she was going to place those opening salvos. In a 21-13, 21-14 victory, she served up four aces, the equivalent in this game of a hole-in-one.

Perhaps the success of the serve is thanks to the semaphore signalling going on behind her partner's back every time Connely addressed the ball. The finger-waggling carries much the same purpose as the coded line-out call in rugby. But is infinitely more photogenic.

Whatever was the message in Pires' fingers, it was all too much for the Greek women, who now sit in third place in Pool C, without a win to their name, relying on mathematics for any hope of progressing. The Brazilians, on the other hand, march on to the next round, where they could meet the Australian naysayers, Sanderson and Cook. The orange-bikini-clad chorus line will be waiting to welcome them all on court. -@Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2004

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Sport