Paris presents deepest women’s Olympic volleyball field ever

HERMOSA BEACH, California — On and on and on the list went, to the point that Tri Bourne, sitting down with USA Volleyball outside hitter Kelsey Robinson Cook one day and middle Dana Rettke another, laughed and wondered: So. .. is there any team in the Paris Olympic Games that isn’t contending for a medal?

To which both of them replied, in effect: Not really.

“Now there’s a lot of teams that have a realistic chance of winning a gold medal,” Robinson Cook said. “I would say Turkey, Brazil, China, Japan, Italy, Serbia, Poland, us — I’m not kidding, anything can happen.”

Yes, Robinson Cook is playing the role of the sage veteran, one in which you must never underestimate any opponent, even France, considerable underdogs Pool A. It’s an important hat to wear, particularly in an event as unique as the Olympic Games, where the lights are brightest, the stage biggest, where everything is magnified to a degree only seen once every four years. But the unprecedented depth of the field is also a legitimate truth, a result of the Olympic system shifting to favor a stronger tournament rather than a more globally balanced one.

“How they’ve done the qualification is totally different than year’s past,” Robinson Cook said. “It’s a true ranking, which hasn’t always been the case. It used to be two teams from every continent, basically, and now it’s one through ten. It’s going to be very gnarly.”

Indeed, only Kenya and France, qualifying by virtue of a continental berth and a home wild card, respectively, can be considered relatively easy victories. After that, it is, as Robinson Cook said, her California vernacular showing, “gnarly.”

Rettke agreed, rattling off a similar laundry list of potential medal winners. They’ll be tested immediately, in a pool that includes both the gold medal winners from 2021 — the USA — and bronze in Serbia, whose seeding dipped due to a poor showing at VNL that was mostly the result of not sending their full roster. Brazil, the silver medalists in Tokyo, headline a Pool B in which they are heavy favorites to win over Poland, Japan, and Kenya.

But it is the Italian women who enter the Games as the odds-on favorites to win gold, coming off a VNL-winning campaign that saw them vanquish the USA, Poland and Japan. Only Brazil, with arguably the best player in the world in Gabi, boasted a better record in the VNL, while Italian outside Paola Egonu led all scoring and finished fourth in blocks.

Since winning that historic gold in Tokyo, the USA, as both Robinson Cook and Rettke agreed, hasn’t fully rediscovered its top form just yet.

“Each time you step on the court it’s a different equation to success,” said Robinson Cook, who is playing in her third Olympic Games. “I’m just excited to see what our highest potential looks like because I don’t think we’ve gotten there yet. The last three years we’ve been trying to find our identity as a team. We know what Turkey’s best looks like. We know that max, but we don’t know what ours looks like and that’s what fires me up is to find that.”

If and when they do, it will add yet another layer to the deepest Olympic field in recent memory.

Coming Friday: A complete USA Volleyball schedule, with all the pool-play matches for the men’s and women’s indoor teams and all four beach teams.

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