Olympic volleyball on Copacabana Beach — a perfect match in Rio
Olympic Beach Volleyball: Copacabana’s Natural Sand Is Just Right for Olympic Beach Volleyball
RIO DE JANEIRO — It was midmorning on Copacabana Beach, six months before the Olympics, and Brazil’s most famous volleyball player, Giovane Gávio, stepped barefoot onto the sand.
It gave under his weight, just enough to leave a loose, collapsing footprint. Gávio bent and scooped countless grains into his hand. It was soft to the touch, more like a fine kitchen spice than pieces of rock.
Close to 90 percent of the grains, rounded over millenniums by the sea, are between 0.25 and 1 millimeter — about 1/25 of an inch — in diameter. The rest are a bit bigger, up to 2 millimeters, or smaller, between 0.15 and 0.25 millimeters.
Gávio, a star player of indoor volleyball and beach volleyball, and now a respected coach, let the sand run through his fingers. He brushed it off without leaving tiny grains or dusty residue, and he smiled.
“In Copacabana, the sand is perfect,” Gávio said.
Not all beach sand is equal, and much of it is not fit for top-level beach volleyball. For the last three Summer Olympics — Athens in 2004, Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012 — tons of sand were shipped in, sometimes from other countries. There is a recipe, and different sands from different places are often mixed together to make a worthy combination.
Was Copacabana’s sand good enough for the Games, or would different sand have to be hauled in?
To suggest that Copacabana’s sand might not be worthy of the Olympics is to invite a dismissive scoff. Rio is a spiritual home for beach volleyball, a premier event at the Olympics. The idea of shipping sand, better beach-volleyball sand, to one of the world’s most iconic beaches was sacrilege.
“Copacabana and beach volleyball have perfect chemistry,” said Angelo Squeo, the beach volleyball director for the international volleyball federation, known as the F.I.V.B. for its French abbreviation.
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When it comes to sand chemistry, there may be no one more knowledgeable than Todd Knapton, a vice president of Hutcheson Sand and Mixes in Huntsville, Ontario. The company is far from any ocean. Knapton has played volleyball once, he said.
But Knapton has been the official sand consultant for the volleyball federation since shortly after the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, where beach volleyball made its Olympic debut. When Canadian players told him that the sand was merely all right in Atlanta, Knapton obtained samples from some of the sport’s notable homes, places like Manhattan Beach in Southern California and the Brazilian coast. He wanted to see what made their sand just right.
The specifications he recommended for beach volleyball competitions have been in place for 20 years now. Organizers at F.I.V.B. tour events are required to send a sample of the sand that they are considering using — 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) from layers down to 40 centimeters (about 16 inches).
Since nearly half of the F.I.V.B. tour events take place nowhere near a natural beach but in temporary arenas in places like downtown plazas or city parks, organizers must ship in sand from elsewhere. Knapton makes sure they get the right stuff.
At the 2012 London Olympics, beach volleyball was held at Horse Guards Parade near 10 Downing Street. That sand came from a quarry in Surrey. At the 2008 Beijing Games, all 17,000 tons of the sand came from Hainan Island in the South China Sea. And for the 2004 Athens Games, the world-class beaches of Greece were too pebbly for world-class volleyball. The sand came from a quarry in Belgium.
As with Australia’s Bondi Beach, site of the beach volleyball competition at the 2000 Sydney Games, Knapton and Olympics organizers decided that Copacabana’s sand was good enough. Bringing sand from somewhere else would have violated Brazil’s environmental laws, anyway. They were allowed only to move sand from elsewhere on Copacabana to flatten and build up what is no
Since then, nearly all the big international beach volleyball events that come to Rio de Janeiro take place on Copacabana.
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