Volleyball in the Summer Olympics
Volleyball is one of the world's most popular sports, with over 37 million followers only in the United States and over 800 million globally, making it the most popular participant sport around the world. Since 1964, volleyball has been consistently a part of the Summer Olympics program for both men and women.
Volleyball competitions will be held during the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo and will take place between July 24 and August 8, 2021. The event will involve 24 volleyball teams and 48 beach volleyball teams. The indoor volleyball tournament will be held at Ariake Arena in Ariake and the beach volleyball tournament will be hosted in Shiokaze Park, in the temporary Shiokaze Park Stadium.
Volleyball was a demonstration sport at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris before it was formally approved by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The IOC endeavoured to remove the sport from the 1968 Olympics after it was admitted in 1964. Despite player and fan complaints, it was maintained on the squad. Beach volleyball, a variant of regular volleyball that is played outdoors and has a slightly different set of rules, was introduced as a medal sport in 1996 after proving to be popular.
The volleyball Olympic event has a relatively consistent competitive format in terms of qualifying. Each tournament has a total of twelve teams. Host countries are always pre-qualified. The Men's and Women's World Cup each qualifies two teams. Five teams screen as champions of the continental qualifying events, while the four remaining spots are determined through world qualification tournaments.
Volleyball was originally played at the Olympics under a "round-robin" format, in which each team competes all the other teams once, with medals awarded based on the number of victories and point averages achieved during competitions. This system was divisive since the winning team was frequently chosen before all of the matches were finished. An innovative technique was adopted in 1972 to solve the problem, which included a final round of the highest-scoring teams.
Top Medalist Nations
The only teams to win various gold medals in the men's event since its beginning are Brazil, the United States, and the former Soviet Union. Japan, Poland, the Netherlands, Russia, and defunct Yugoslavia won each of the last five editions of the Men's Olympic Volleyball Tournament.
In women's volleyball, gold medals are less evenly awarded than in men's volleyball. Just five nations have won gold medals in the fourteen editions of the Women's Olympic Volleyball Tournament including Brazil, Cuba, China, Japan, and the former Soviet Union. Let's take a look at the top medallist nations:
Soviet Union 12 medals (Gold 7), Brazil 10 medals (Gold 5), United States 10 medals (Gold 3), Japan 9 medals (Gold 3), China 6 medals (Gold 3), Cuba 5 medals (Gold 3), Russia 6 medals (Gold 1), Netherlands 2 medals (Gold 1), Poland 3 medals (Gold 1), FR Yugoslavia 2 medals (Gold 1).
The odds on volleyball and beach volleyball at the Summer Olympics is in the menu to the left.