Four Olympic Beach Places Decided by Sunday 🌍
The Asian championship in China and the South American in Brazil each send one men's pair and one women's pair to Los Angeles. Nine men's pairs are already out of the pools at Shangluo.
Four places at the Los Angeles Olympics are settled by Sunday night, two of them at Shangluo in China and two of them at Joao Pessoa in Brazil.
The AVC Beach Volleyball Continental Championships run from 2 to 6 September with 24 pairs a gender, and the South American championship runs from 3 to 6 September with 16. Each awards one quota place per gender.
That is the deal the FIVB set for all five confederations. Europe settled its two at Stare Jablonki in Poland in mid-August and Africa settled its two at Alexandria a week after that.
Nine Men's Pairs Are Already Through in China
Australia's Mark Nicolaidis and Izac Carracher, Japan's Kai Kurokawa and Ryuichi Adachi and Indonesia's Bintang Akbar and Sofyan Rachman Efendi have all won twice in straight sets.
So have Japan's Takumi Takahashi and Jumpei Ikeda, China's Wang Yanwei and Du Hongjun, and Thailand's Pithak Tipjan and Wachirawit Muadpha, which fills the top half of the qualified list two days in.
Three more are guaranteed on pool position, which puts Wu Jiaxin and Zhou Chaowei of China, Thomas Hodges and Ben Hood of Australia and Sam and Ben O'Dea of New Zealand into the knockout rounds.
The FIVB Funds Most of This Women's Field
17 of the 24 women's pairs at Shangluo are backed by the FIVB's Volleyball Empowerment programme, which funds coaching for 10 of the nations in the draw.
The largest coaching grant at the tournament goes to Vanuatu at 430,500 dollars, ahead of Australia at 273,000 and New Zealand at 231,000. Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Hong Kong are on 21,000 each, a twentieth of what a country of 330,000 people gets.
The FIVB lists Miller Pata as the coach Vanuatu's grant pays for, and lists Miller Pata in Pool D as half of Vanuatu's pair. We cannot reconcile the two and neither can the page they both sit on.
China's Xu Yan and Xia Xinyi are seeded first in the women's draw, Australia's Stefanie Fejes and Taliqua Clancy second, Japan's Asami Shiba and Reika Murakami third and New Zealand's Shaunna Polley and Olivia MacDonald fourth.
Xia is the defending champion, with a different partner, and is chasing a fifth Asian title. Clancy is chasing a sixth.
The Last Two Places Go in November
Both championships finish on Sunday and both finals are single matches with an Olympic place on them. The last two continental places go at Vega Baja in Puerto Rico from 4 to 9 November.
The United States already has one pair of each gender at the Games as hosts, so its own confederation's championship is about everybody else in it.
