Beach volleyball, like the life of the medieval peasant, is extremely boring but, mercifully, is over fairly quickly. Both volleyballers and serfs spend their useful lives serving, digging, setting and spiking. Both spend a lot of time barefoot with sand in their mouths. And both are instantly forgotten by the passing observer the moment they disappear from view.
It’s not that beach volleyball is intrinsically pointless. It’s not. It is great fun, and a tremendous way of meeting people who smell like coconut. The problem is that it’s not so much a sport as a pillow fight in a co-ed dorm between mostly naked, attractive young people who are one high-five away from letting the whole thing devolve into a roiling mass of lust.
Naturally there will be those who insist that the game is about stamina and speed and tactics. Resolute in their belief that it is a sport and not a combative game of kiss-catch, they will ignore the huge magnetic force at its centre that grows in strength as it pulls in redundant fripperies such as points and championship standings and sponsors’ messages.
This all-encompassing force is elemental, ancient, a sort of honey-bronze colour — and it is waxed every week. It is, of course, the Female Thigh.
Apparently, men play beach volleyball too. Whatever. In this game, they are affirmative-action appointments, tokens hopelessly out of place in an atmosphere charged with Amazon girl-power. Not even traditional macho lechery survives in this simmering cauldron of feminine vanity: check me skeef (skew), the Thigh seems to say, and I’ll pop your head like a grape, you pitiful monkey-man.
The women are the image and soul of the game, half poseur, half athlete, all swimsuit model. No Lycra bodysuits here for aerodynamic movement or biomechanical safety. If the choice is between looking like a million bucks and continuing the charade of beach volleyball as a serious sport, their priorities are firmly in place, usually wedged fairly high up their derrières.
But there’s always someone who takes everything too seriously and, this time, it was the people who make Swatch watches. It was ironic, and perhaps fairly lucrative for them, that, as manufacturers of the world’s only unfixable timepiece, they chose to sponsor an event clogged with sand. Whatever their motives, the Swatch-FIVB World Tour has been squatting at the northern end of Camps Bay beach for the past fortnight, giving Cape Town a taste of that heady world once only glimpsed in Peter Stuyvesant ads.
The weather was iffish at times — the bronze-medal-winning Salgado sisters from Brazil seemed on the verge of frostbite — but the play was entertaining for those who find that sort of thing entertaining.
Olympic champions Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh of the United States won gold and $200 000, which one assumes they’ll put down as a deposit on some prime sand on the Cancun beachside that they’ll turn into Misty and Kerri’s Beach Volleyball University for Fallen Models. Some men also played.
The organisation was excellent. An ambulance was on hand at all times, in case someone broke a nail, and a large bus labelled ”Metro Incident Command Centre” loomed ominously in the background, perhaps to make sure no one tried anything funny with anthrax in a Speedo.
But special mention must be made of the hired security guards who kept the throngs, sometimes as many as four people at a time, off the court between matches. No amount of sunshine could penetrate their cardigans, fleeces, puffer jackets, windbreakers and raincoats — and despite reaching temperatures of up to 3 000°C under their felt vests, they never broke a sweat.
Now those are real athletes.