Girls’s Olympic Seaside Volleyball Preview: USA heavy favorites to podium in Paris

0
27


HERMOSA BEACH, California — Brian Prepare dinner runs an unbiased, deeply metric-based volleyball analytical web site referred to as TruVolley. Whereas Prepare dinner, an American who as soon as competed for USA Volleyball and is married to Olympic gold medalist Kelsey Robinson-Prepare dinner, clearly has a leaning in the direction of the USA, his program doesn’t. It’s a machine doing what machines do: Taking numbers, spinning them up, spitting them out. A million unemotional, unbiased simulations of the Olympic Video games in all.

Which makes the numbers that produced relating to the upcoming Olympic Video games all of the extra engaging for USA seashore volleyball followers: 85.07 %.

These are the chances that both Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth, or Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes come residence with an Olympic medal.

Until your names are Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty Could-Treanor, one doesn’t get numbers resembling these. That’s how robust the USA is getting into the Paris Olympic Video games, which start on Saturday.

Taryn Kloth and Kristen Nuss after successful the Espinho Elite16/Volleyball World picture

Nuss and Kloth enter because the No. 2 seed, Cheng and Hughes the three. The one crew seeded increased is Brazil’s Ana Patricia Silva and Duda Lisboa, who’re at the moment on their worst skid as a crew, with three straight tournaments with out a podium and a ninth on the Gstaad Elite16, their lowest outcome since Could of 2022.

Cheng and Hughes — the previous USC teammates — and Nuss and Kloth — the previous LSU pair — in the meantime, are on fairly a special pattern. Each will enter Paris having gained the final occasion they performed; Cheng and Hughes claimed gold on the Ostrava Elite16, the place they beat Ana Patricia and Duda within the semifinals, and Nuss and Kloth gained in Gstaad, their second consecutive gold medal after additionally successful on the Espinho Elite16.

Sara Hughes, left, and Kelly Cheng after successful in Ostrava/Volleyball World picture

It doesn’t get any higher than that, and it’s a distinctly totally different really feel from the Tokyo Video games, the place April Ross and Alix Klineman entered as heavy favorites — and delivered on these odds by successful gold — and Cheng and Sarah Sponcil have been the plucky younger children seeded ninth who would possibly upset a crew or two.

Now the USA is in its finest place to realistically win a number of medals since Walsh Jennings and Could-Treanor beaet Ross and Jen Kessy within the London championship match.

Not that it is going to be simple. It by no means is in any match, a lot much less one by which the elimination rounds are single-elimination, a lot much less when the stakes are the best they may get each 4 years.

A lot much less when six groups have gained an Elite16 gold medal in 2024 alone.

The Massive Six of the Paris Olympic Video games

For the previous three years, the query of who the most effective crew on the planet is resulted in a near-unanimous reply: Ana Patricia Silva and Duda Lisboa. Within the 25 tournaments they’ve performed since reuniting in 2022, they’ve gained 9 gold medals, three silvers, and 5 bronze. They’re the No. 1 ranked crew on the planet, although solely by the slim margin of 20 factors, over Nuss and Kloth.

Ana Patricia Silva-Duda Lisboa
Duda and Ana Patricia/Volleyball World picture

When they’re enjoying on the peak of their skills, or wherever shut, as they did in Brasilia in Could, there is no such thing as a crew who can beat them. Six groups tried in Brasilia, and solely two managed to assert a set. Even Nuss and Kloth have been smoked within the finals, a 21-17, 21-14 tour de power at residence for Ana Patricia and Duda.

However they haven’t been capable of maintain that stage of play in 2024. It’s nonetheless in there, no doubting that.

The query is: Can they revive it on the proper time?

And if not, can their fellow Brazilians, Barbara and Carol?

Like Ana Patricia and Duda, Barbara and Carol have been queens of the rostrum these previous three seasons: 12 medals in 32 occasions. Their greatest? An Elite16 gold in Doha to start the season, their first win on the Volleyball World Seaside Professional Tour’s highest stage. It added one other stage of depth to what’s already broadly thought of the deepest the Seaside Professional Tour has ever been.

And it was made all of the deeper one month later in Tepic, Mexico, when one more duo gained their first Elite16 gold.

Switzerland’s Tanja Huberli and Nina Brunner had already confirmed they might win on the recreation’s highest stage. They’d gained a number of European Championships and had established themselves as one of the formidable defensive groups on the planet. And but, unusual because it nonetheless is to write down, they hadn’t gained a gold on the Seaside Professional Tour.

That modified in Mexico, after they went undefeated en path to their first gold, beating 4 straight Olympic groups to clinch it.

Like Huberli and Brunner, Germans Cinja Tillmann and Svenja Muller had confirmed, many occasions over, they might compete, and win, on the highest stage. They simply hadn’t completed it in two years.

Lastly, practically two years to the day since their final gold on the Seaside Professional Tour, they did it once more, placing collectively a formidable displaying eventually week’s Vienna Elite16 by which they didn’t drop a match and made fast work of all three elimination rounds to their first gold of the Olympic quad. When she’s on — and certainly she was on — Tillmann has an argument as the most effective participant on the planet, and when Muller is constant along with her ball management, it’s, and was in Vienna, a potent combo.

These six groups — Nuss and Kloth, Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes, Ana Patricia and Duda, Barbara and Carol, Huberli and Brunner, Tillmann and Muller — comprise what could possibly be referred to as the Massive Six of Paris. However lurking simply behind is one other contingent of groups who’ve come tantalizingly near breaking by means of. They simply haven’t gained an Elite but this season.

It wouldn’t be a shock to see them do it in Paris.

Contenders to podium in Paris

At the start of the 2024 season, after one of the profitable years of their careers, Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson scrapped all the things.

These two golds they gained in 2024, in Jurmala and Montreal? They might do higher.

They type of have, type of haven’t.

Brandie Wilkerson, left, and Melissa Humana-Paredes/Rick Atwood picture

The Canadians made the finals in Elite16s in Doha and Ostrava, falling to Barbara and Carol within the former, Cheng and Hughes within the latter. They’ve gained 18 of their 26 matches this yr and have only one end outdoors of the highest 5. If ever there have been a time for a Canadian girls’s crew to podium on the Olympics, 2024 is the yr, and Brian Prepare dinner and TruVolley give them a 31.45% probability at doing simply that — increased odds than even Cheng and Hughes.

Simply behind them are the Netherlands’ Katja Stam and Raisa Schoon, who debuted in Tokyo as underdogs and can enter Paris as bona fide contenders to medal. They’ve medaled twice in Elite16s this yr — silver in a wonderful remaining in Tepic, bronze in a dominant win over Spaniards and TCU stars Daniela Alvarez and Tania Moreno in Espinho — and pushed Nuss and Kloth deep into the third set of the Gstaad quarterfinals, the place they fell 15-13 to the eventual champs.

Tina Graudina/olimpiade.lv picture

Falling into the close-but-no-Elite-gold class of 2024 are Latvians Tina Graudina and Anastasija Samoilova. The fourth-place Cinderellas of Tokyo, Graudina — who additionally performed at USC — and Samoilova have since established themselves as among the best groups on the planet, and Graudina would be the flag-bearer for Latvia on the opening ceremonies. They’ve medaled in three out of their final 4 tournaments — silver on the Stare Jablonki Problem, bronze in Ostrava, bronze in Gstaad — and likewise gained a Problem in Recife, Brazil, in March.

All of these groups, all that depth, and nonetheless: 85.07 % probability of an American crew on the rostrum.

That’s a quantity USA Volleyball followers can get enthusiastic about.



Source_link

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here