In defence of beach volleyball

I’m a huge sports fan.  I’m also a great believer in the ethos of the Olympic Games, even though I am suspicious of how de Coubertin’s noble ideas have become increasingly marginalised by creeping global capitalism.

With the Olympic Games on our doorstep this year, myself and Anna bid for a number of tickets to various Olympic events.  Twenty-three in total – and we were successful in only three.  No doubt LOCOG were looking to create a fair system for ticket allocation but they only succeeded in creating an arbitrary one, whereby some people got everything and others got nothing.  I suppose in some respects we were fortunate and we had the opportunity to be part of the Games, unlike several others who would have loved to have been able to attend three events.

We didn’t manage to secure tickets for some of what we’d really have liked to see – such as athletics, swimming, diving and judo.  But we did find our way into watching fencing and table tennis – the former delighted Anna as, in a former life, she was a fencer – as well as beach volleyball.

Ah, beach volleyball.  It’s something I’ve watched courtesy of the BBC’s televised Olympic coverage since its inauguration at the Barcelona Games but for which I’ve never developed a real interest.   What I have gained over the years is a respect for the game and its athletes – if not necessarily the way that it is presented and packaged – in addition to a disdain for those taking cheap shots at the sport, who claim it should not be a part of the Olympics or who underestimate the technical quality of Olympic beach volleyball.

Beach volleyball is often perceived as something of a sideshow to the principal Olympic events.  Like synchronised swimming before, it has to be laughed at before most people take it seriously.  At best many consider it light-hearted popular entertainment but others can be notably more hostile - including The Times’ Giles Coren who wrote such a horrifically judgemental piece on Monday, completely ridiculing the sport while displaying his ignorance in the process, that I feel compelled to make a defence of beach volleyball here.

It is quite amazing that two people can be watching the same sporting event and come away with such differing appreciations.  While, as I’ve indicated previously, the culture surrounding beach volleyball is not exactly my cup of tea, I am able to look beyond it and recognise the finer points of the game for what they are.  Unfortunately, Coren lacks this ability and seems to have made his mind up even before he’d had any chance to witness the serving, spiking, blocking and digging on offer.  “The field of sand [resembled] a bull ring”, he opined, simply for poetic effect.  “But there would be no blood today, unless one of the girls broke a nail.”  Hmm, no prejudice there then.  The kind of pathetic sexist jokes that even The Sun refuses to print are fair game when writing about beach volleyball it seems – an indication of how far in the credibility stakes the game has yet to come.

Prejudices aside, Coren enters into some more detailed objections to the game as an Olympic sport.  “This isn’t sport, it’s a saucy seaside postcard” he explains.  “It is a fun holiday game that has slipped into the Olympics by a back door marked ‘sex’.  There’s no skill to speak of, no variation of pace, no subtlety to the game.  You can only score with a smash or a fake smash-dink, or if your opponents fall over in the sand.” 

Let’s take the references to sex and saucy postcards first.  Clearly Coren was unfortunate not to watch either the USA or the Australians’ talented women’s teams in action because their “veterans” (i.e. all clearly over 30) are far from sex symbols.  And, of course, objecting to a sport simply on the basis of how players are attired or their physical attractiveness is no objection at all – unless the logic is extended to the likes of tennis, where Maria Sharapova’s style is far more seductive to my eye than beach volleyball’s double Olympic Gold Medalist Misty May-Treanor.  Admittedly there is a “fun” culture surrounding the game, but then this is beach volleyball.  Perhaps Coren has never been to a beach before?

Coren makes the point that the presence of “sex countries” such as “Brazil, Sweden and Romania” mean that their women are perceived as “suntanned, sexually liberal from a young age and principally employed in the sex industry”.  Quite honestly, I’d guess he was the only person in the crowd making such an assessment.   Most were simply appreciating the drama.  As Coren will know, like other Olympic sports entry to the beach volleyball competition is subject to qualification, not assumptions about liberal morality, and his argument is bogus.  Accepted, beach volleyball oozes sex appeal – but it is not fundamentally about sex any more than is women’s tennis.  Or men’s rugby for that matter (why should sex appeal be exclusively aimed towards heterosexual males?).

The bikini-clad “entertainers” who came on to dance during intervals were not only dreadful (they were less entertaining than the rakers who came to level the sand between periods of play) but probably don’t help challenge the attitudes of those who would reduce the game to a celebration of heterosexual sexuality.  However, I naturally assume this is an attempt to recreate the “fun” culture of actual beaches (well, beaches anywhere apart from Lowestoft) where you might actually see people in bikinis playing with giant balls.   Whatever it is, it is a sideshow and hardly the essence of the sport.  As for “Mexican waves and playing the Macarena” – in what way does that debar beach volleyball from being a valid sport, Mr Coren?  A few years ago I went to a football match at Burnley and saw cheerleaders aged between 6 and 8 writhing around to Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?  If people want to complain about the use of sexual appeal in sport there are far more valid objections to make.

Anyway, let’s get back to the main thing: the game which, it is claimed, is devoid of skill, subtlety or any other redeeming qualities.  I’ll make it simple: beach volleyball is a form of volleyball, a game that I used to play.  Volleyball itself is a sophisticated sport, combining strategy and technique with individual player specialisation and choreographed team movement for systematic play.  True, in beach volleyball the importance of the latter are much reduced but it is no more a non-sport on that basis than is Twenty20 cricket, which is not the highest form of the game but certainly not one lacking in skill.  It’s simply that the required skills are different.   The parallel with Twenty20 cricket is actually a very good one, as beach volleyball is often distinctly more exciting and entertaining than “true” volleyball, even if the tactical purists will never fully take to it.

To serve with consistency and accuracy is a skill in itself.  Some of the blocking on display, especially from the Brazilian men, was world class and would be recognised as such in any form of the game.  In some respects beach volleyball is that bit tougher than conventional volleyball, as teams are smaller and allowed fewer touches and thus accuracy, understanding between the players and co-ordination of movement is of increased importance.  It’s also not easy playing on sand, something that obviously doesn’t occur to Coren or others who believe that “you or I could get up to something like bronze medal standard with a couple of hours of training”.  All forms of volleyball require a great deal more preparation than that, and to excel at any sport requires the ability to think a good game and intellectually outmanoeuvre opponents. 

Coren seems to take the view that beach volleyball is a woman’s sport, perhaps due to a combination of his viewing sex as the essence of the game and his own heterosexual preferences.  The idea that men actually play the game too sends him cold: “some men came on to play and I found that a little gross.  I felt dirty just watching it”, he says.  This says far more about the journalist than it does about the game.  He goes on to describe male beach volleyballers as “the Olympic distillation of a jobless thicko beach bum, carrying totally inferior sperm to the supercharged world-beating millionaires of the serious track and field”.  This man has some serious prejudices, which presumably account for him being unable to value the amazing performances of the British duo and their Brazilian counterparts in one of the most dramatic first sets I have ever witnessed.

Clearly a problem beach volleyball has is how it popularly compares to other, more “serious” sports.  This makes it easy for Coren to claim that “if [beach volleyball players] were good enough to play tennis, they’d be playing tennis”.  But why should they want to play tennis, when they’re volleyball players?  It’s a completely different discipline.  I wonder if Coren extends the same logic to table tennis players, who should presumably be putting down their bats and showing off their bums like Maria Sharapova?  It is a great pity that a society we seem to have developed a sporting hierarchy, with the likes of the highly publicised football, rugby, athletics and tennis towards the top and the less popular or more “marginal” sports such as water polo and beach volleyball easily disregarded.

I don’t ever expect to see a beach volleyball player voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year.  I don’t imagine Britain will ever produce a beach volleyball world champion, or even an Olympic medallist.  Part of the reason for this is, ultimately, the way the sport is perceived in this country.  As long as the likes of the sex-obsessed Coren are allowed to pour scorn on the game and its participants unchallenged, its potential development into a wider participant sport in the UK will be stifled.  The message that should be sent out, loud and clear, is that beach volleyball is fun and while we can’t all be Misty May-Treanor there is plenty of scope for individuals of all ages to get out and enjoy it. 

Let’s not have any of this tosh about beach volleyball not being a sport.  It is and the Olympics are the ideal forum for it.  In fact, if the sex associations simultaneously derided yet reinforced by Coren are to be challenged, the continuing development of the game as a respected, widely-enjoyed Olympic sport must be central to it.  It may be true that Olympic beach volleyball is as much a spectacle as a game, but if that enables more people to enjoy what the sport can offer it is no bad thing.

All photographs taken by myself at Horse Guards' parade on Monday 30th July 2012.