Olmps

chance to play the ball to an unmarked hitter..A similar play is the crossover, in which the two attackers run on crossing diagonals.. The piston move has two attackers at the net, one behind the other, again forcing the defender to follow the movement of one of them, potentially leaving the other with an open shot..

On the Beach

In beach volleyball keep an eye on the signals players

are making behind their backs, indicating what kind of serve or defensive play they want their teammates to make..

Volleyball Goes to the Olympics

Volleyball’s first moment

in the Olympic limelight may

have been its finest.. Seventy per cent of the Japanese population watched the opening ceremony

of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics

and nearly all of them turned on again for the hosts’ most celebrated sporting triumph, the

women’s volleyball final.. It

was an epic battle between the tall, powerful squad from the Soviet Union and the shorter, lighter but indefatigable Japanese team..The latter had begun life in 1953 when Daimatsu Hirofumi, a manager at the Nichibo Spinning Mills near Osaka, started up a women’s

volleyball programme..An ex-soldier, the harshness of his methods was legendary and his team trained after work for six hours a day.. But it worked, and Japan – in effect the Nichibo team – arrived at the Olympics as defending World Champions..The final went

BRAZIL’S Women Attempt A TRIPLe BLOCK, BEIJING 2008

all the way to a fifth set, and the Soviet team, having pulled level, threatened to take the game at the death, but the Japanese held their nerve, took back the serve and won..

Though Olympic volleyball has never quite matched this moment of high emotion, the women’s game has continued to provide the sport’s biggest stories. .The victory of the Chinese women’s team at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, the first in which China had competed, was acclaimed at home as a huge triumph for the nation.. Lang Ping, the team’s star, acquired heroic status and earned the soubriquet ‘iron hammer’..A trio of golds for the Cu- ban women (in 1992, 1996 and 2000) was followed by the brilliant recovery of the Chinese women in the 2004 Olympic final against the Russians, a victory met with euphoria by a Chinese population that was now glued to its television sets..The women’s volleyball was duly one of the hottest tickets at Beijing 2008, where the competition was made all the spicier by the presence of Lang Ping as coach of the US women’s team..They took the silver ahead of China, with the gold going to Brazil..

In the men’s game the Olympics were dominated by the Soviet Union and Eastern European nations until the 1980s. . Since

then the USA (1984, 1988 and 2008) and Brazil (1992, 2004), both benefiting from the decline of communist volleyball and the rise of the professional game, have won golds, as have the Dutch (1996) and theYugoslavs (2000)..

Since volleyball first arrived at the Olympics in 1964, it has become faster and more acrobatic..Yet outside of Japan and China it has not been able to attract the kinds of audience and TV ratings that a game played so widely might be expected to attract.. On and off the court, volleyball remains bound to its amateur roots, with strict forms of etiquette applied to player behaviour.. Bad language, for example, is regularly punished and over-emotional displays are frowned upon..

Beach volleyball offers much of what the traditional game has lacked..When it debuted at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, it was the third event to sell out – though cynics suggested that was as much down to the bikinis and well-toned flesh on display as the sporting experience.. Indeed, in 1999 the FIVB rewrote the sport’s sartorial rules, insisting on the two-piece bikini kit for women (with a maximum size for the bottom half) and making more revealing kit compulsory for men, too..The beach discipline has proved enormously popular at every Olympics since..

WATER POLO

29 July–12 August 2012

WaTER Polo Arena, Olympic Park

Athletes: 260 | Golds up for grabs: 2

Olympic Presence

Men since 1900; women since 2000.

Olympic Format

Both men and women’s teams play in preliminary groups

and the top eight progress to the quarter-finals..

Current Contenders:

In the men’s tournament the established nations are

Italy, Hungary, Russia, Serbia and Croatia – though the USA

are contenders too.. In the women’s tournament, Australia and the Netherlands will field strong teams, as will the Americans

and Italians..

Past Champions:

Hungary: 9 | Italy: 4 | Great Britain: 4

Why Watch Water Polo?

‘Fists flew and blood flowed,’ ran the headline in the

NewYorkTimes on 6 December 1956..You might have been expecting a boxing report and in a way you would have been right, but the Times was actually reviewing Hungary’s 4-0 victory over the Soviet Union in the water polo competition at the Melbourne Olympics.. By far the most famous moment in the sport’s history, it was also the biggest ever Olympic brawl..

The swimming caps with huge ear protectors worn by water polo players wouldn’t look out of place on a rugby field and they wear two pairs of trunks for a reason.. Ears get mauled, trunks get ripped and these are among the least of the shenanigans that go on in this furious form of aquatic handball.. It is insanely demanding.. Players must constantly tread water, beating out furious eggbeater patterns of strokes with their legs, lift themselves up out of the water when necessary and then switch to lung-burning sprints as the play moves from end to end..

Dominated in modern times by Hungary, Russia, Italy, Yugoslavia and its descendant states, water polo is invariably played at a momentous emotional and physical pitch, with players, coaches and fans given to outbreaks of volcanic temper. .What the sport lacks in elegance it more than makes up for in tempestuousness and titanic competitiveness..

The Story of Water Polo

The precise origins of water polo are not clear. Some

sources trace it back to members of the British Army of the Raj attempting an aquatic version of the horse-bound form of polo, but it seems more likely to have been developed for a lark by young men in Britain swimming in lakes and the first generation of Victorian municipal baths..

Players took their cues from rugby and football, attempting to score goals with much fighting, rucking, ducking and punching along the way.. Early variants included scoring by placing the ball on a buoy or at the end of the pool, and goalies standing outside the water and only jumping in when their goals were threatened..

A measure of rationality, if not civility, was introduced to the melee by Scottish pioneer William Wilson, whose 1877 rules for the game of ‘water football’ forbade the tackling of players not in possession of the ball. .The first organised competition, the London Water Polo League, was established in 1888 and two years later Scotland beat England 4-0 in the sport’s international debut.. Interestingly, the Scottish players’ preference for collective

Victorian gentlemen experiment with aquatic forms of polo

passing over the English taste for individual dribbling mirrored the nations’ contemporary approaches to football..

In the years before the First World War, young, often collegeeducated men were introduced to the game in the cities of continental Europe and North America. .The Italians were particularly keen, despite a Milanese paper describing the game in 1890 as being ‘like football but more tiring and difficult, requiring energy and strength beyond the ordinary’..The sport also proved immediately popular in France, Belgium, the United States and, above all, in Hungary andYugoslavia..

Controlled by FINA since 1930, the game has been steadily refined to speed up play and try to get players to concentrate on the ball rather than the man or woman..The Hungarians were the first to use the dry pass, in which the ball moves from hand to hand rather than the receiver picking it up out of the water..This was the basis of their long era of superiority either side of the Second World War.

Leather balls, which absorbed water and got slower and heavier as the game progressed, were replaced by rubber coated versions

during the 1930s. .As with basketball, which was suffering from low-scoring and over-physical play, shot clocks were introduced in the 1950s.. Henceforward, a team had 45 seconds (now down to 35) to attempt a shot on goal before possession passed to the opposition.. Similarly, accumulated fouls and violent play were increasingly punished, ultimately leading to players being excluded for short periods of the game.. It is in these situations, with one side a player down, that most goals are scored..

Game On:Water Polo Basics

Water polo is a game of attack, defence and transition.

When a team has the ball it moves it by dribbling, passing and hopefully shooting on goal..When a team loses possession, it blocks, tackles and tries to snatch the ball back..Whenever it changes hands there is an almighty sprint by both sides from one end of the pool to the other..

The pool must be at least two metres deep and players are not allowed to touch the bottom, which means that they must

constantly tread water, including during stoppages..There are a lot of these in most games, which despite being scheduled for just 28 minutes of play can last over an hour..The main no-nos are taking the ball underwater, tackling a player without the ball and using two hands to hold the ball (unless you are a goalkeeper)..When a foul is called against a team it concedes possession to the opposition.. If it commits a foul inside its own 5-metre line, the opponents get a

penalty throw on goal..

Dangerous, violent and unsportsmanlike play, of which

there is plenty, results in an exclusion foul being called and a 20-second penalty imposed on the guilty party.. Examples include splashing water in an opponent’s face, and holding or sinking them.. Brutal play, such as kicking or punching with malicious intent, leads to permanent exclusion, with substitution only allowed after four minutes..

The Finer Points

Watching the AttAck

For much of the time, both teams cluster around one

of the goals..The key player to look for is the 2-metre or ‘hole’

man positioned in the centre, and the defender whose job it is to guard him..As well as absorbing a lot of fouls, the 2-metre man is the pivot of most attacking moves, passing the ball along to teammates along the semi-circular perimeter of the 2-metre line..

Some of the best skills in the game can be seen when attacking players find an angle around the defence, using a body feint, a sudden leap or a flick of the wrist to change direction..

Watching the Defence

Defenders look to block their opponent’s paths to goal and to contest and block passes and shots. .They can also tackle players with the ball and attempt to steal it from their grasp..

The best defenders play the ball not the man and concentrate on turning possession over.. However, there is a lot of aggressive body contact, especially underwater.. Look out for illegal grapples, punches, elbowing and groin grabbing..

Water Polo Goes to the Olympics

The first Olympic water polo tournament took place in

the River Seine in 1900 and was contested by clubs from Brussels, Lille and Manchester..The Osborne Swimming Club from Manchester took gold for Great Britain, which went on to win another three titles (1908, 1912 and 1920) before disappearing from the world of competitive water polo altogether.. Britain last qualified for an Olympic tournament in 1956, where it finished seventh of eight..

The 1904 Games saw all the medals go the USA,but as all three teams were American this was scarcely surprising..A team from Germany had made the journey to St Louis but found itself at odds with the American officials, who decided that a goal could only be scored by holding the ball in the net and deemed a partially deflated volleyball perfectly adequate for the competition..The Germans, who were accustomed to different rules and better equipment,derided this‘softball water polo’and refused to compete.. Maybe they knew something the Americans didn’t.. Due to the players’ long immersion in the bacteria-ridden lake, four of the American participants were dead within a year from typhoid..

340 HOW TO WATCH THE OLYMPICS

In 1932 the Hungarians, who had taken the silver medal in 1928, crossed the Atlantic by liner, practising in a tiny onboard pool, and made for Los Angeles..Their victory was the first of the country’s nine subsequent gold medals. . Since then, all but one Olympic tournament has been won by Hungary, Italy,Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union or descendent states of the last two..

Hungary’s victory in 1932 established the new global water polo aristocracy but the future tone of the sport was set at the same tournament by the Brazilians..They almost failed to make the Games at all, the government having initially responded to a collapse of the world coffee market by refusing to fund the trip to LA..Then, in a stroke of administrative genius, it decided that there was a way to send an Olympic squad to America after all, accompanied by a fifty-strong marine band and 25 tonnes of coffee.. Squad members would serve as crew and sell the coffee en route, to cover their expenses..

Things didn’t quite work out..An attempt to pass the ship off as a military vessel to get free passage through the Panama Canal was rumbled by the Panamanian authorities despite the presence of two rusty cannons on board..And coffee sales were so poor that on arriving in the USA, the athletes could only muster $24 between them, enough to send just 24 representatives ashore paying the $1 immigration tax each.. Fortunately for the water polo team, its members were among them..While the rest of the squad headed for Portland and Seattle on a coffee selling mission, they travelled to Los Angeles and wrote themselves into Olympic history at the conclusion of their first round 7-3 defeat by the Germans.. Incensed by what they perceived as the Hungarian referee’s bias, they finished the game with a polite cheer for their opponents and a mass attack on the judges’ stand, eventually halted by the LAPD..

And so it has gone on..The greatest Olympic punch-up of them all took place at the 1956 Hungary-USSR semi-final (see opposite page) but it has not been without rivals..There was a bitter RussiaHungary rematch at the 2000 Olympics, and women’s water polo, which belatedly debuted at the same Games with swimsuit ripping, punching and all, has shown that the boys have no monopoly on this roughhouse of a sport..