HERMOSA BEACH, California — Brian Cook runs an unbiased, deeply metric-based volleyball analytical site called TruVolley. While Cook, an American who once competed for USA Volleyball and is married to Olympic gold medalist Kelsey Robinson-Cook, clearly has a leaning towards the USA, his program does not. It is a machine doing what machines do: Taking numbers, spinning them up, spitting them out. One million unemotional, unbiased simulations of the Olympic Games in all.
Which makes the numbers that produced regarding the upcoming Olympic Games all the more enticing for USA beach volleyball fans: 85.07 percent.
Those are the odds that either Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth, or Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes come home with an Olympic medal.
Unless your names are Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor, one does not get numbers such as those. That’s how strong the USA is entering the Paris Olympic Games, which begin on Saturday.
Nuss and Kloth enter as the No. 2 seed, Cheng and Hughes the 3. The only team seeded higher is Brazil’s Ana Patricia Silva and Duda Lisboa, who are currently on their worst skid as a team, with three straight tournaments without a podium and a ninth at the Gstaad Elite16, their lowest result since May of 2022.
Cheng and Hughes — the former USC teammates — and Nuss and Kloth — the former LSU pair — meanwhile, are on quite a different trend. Both will enter Paris having won the last event they played; Cheng and Hughes claimed gold at the Ostrava Elite16, where they beat Ana Patricia and Duda in the semifinals, and Nuss and Kloth won in Gstaad, their second consecutive gold medal after also winning at the Espinho Elite16.
It does not get any better than that, and it is a distinctly different feel from the Tokyo Games, where April Ross and Alix Klineman entered as heavy favorites — and delivered on those odds by winning gold — and Cheng and Sarah Sponcil were the plucky young kids seeded ninth who might upset a team or two.
Now the USA is in its best position to realistically win multiple medals since Walsh Jennings and May-Treanor beaet Ross and Jen Kessy in the London championship match.
Not that it will be easy. It never is in any tournament, much less one in which the elimination rounds are single-elimination, much less when the stakes are the highest they will get every four years.
Much less when six teams have won an Elite16 gold medal in 2024 alone.
The Big Six of the Paris Olympic Games
For the past three years, the question of who the best team in the world is resulted in a near-unanimous answer: Ana Patricia Silva and Duda Lisboa. In the 25 tournaments they have played since reuniting in 2022, they have won nine gold medals, three silvers, and five bronze. They are the No. 1 ranked team in the world, though only by the slim margin of 20 points, over Nuss and Kloth.
When they are playing at the peak of their abilities, or anywhere close, as they did in Brasilia in May, there is no team who can beat them. Six teams tried in Brasilia, and only two managed to claim a set. Even Nuss and Kloth were smoked in the finals, a 21-17, 21-14 tour de force at home for Ana Patricia and Duda.
But they haven’t been able to sustain that level of play in 2024. It’s still in there, no doubting that.
The question is: Can they revive it at the right time?
And if not, can their fellow Brazilians, Barbara and Carol?
Like Ana Patricia and Duda, Barbara and Carol were queens of the podium these past three seasons: 12 medals in 32 events. Their biggest? An Elite16 gold in Doha to begin the season, their first win on the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour’s highest level. It added another level of depth to what is already widely considered the deepest the Beach Pro Tour has ever been.
And it was made all the deeper one month later in Tepic, Mexico, when yet another duo won their first Elite16 gold.
Switzerland’s Tanja Huberli and Nina Brunner had already proven they could win at the game’s highest level. They’d won multiple European Championships and had established themselves as one of the most formidable defensive teams in the world. And yet, strange as it still is to write, they hadn’t won a gold on the Beach Pro Tour.
That changed in Mexico, when they went undefeated en route to their first gold, beating four straight Olympic teams to clinch it.
Like Huberli and Brunner, Germans Cinja Tillmann and Svenja Muller had proven, many times over, they could compete, and win, at the highest level. They just hadn’t done it in two years.
Finally, nearly two years to the day since their last gold on the Beach Pro Tour, they did it again, putting together an impressive showing at last week’s Vienna Elite16 in which they didn’t drop a match and made quick work of all three elimination rounds to their first gold of the Olympic quad. When she’s on — and indeed she was on — Tillmann has an argument as the best player in the world, and when Muller is consistent with her ball control, it is, and was in Vienna, a potent combo.
Those six teams — Nuss and Kloth, Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes, Ana Patricia and Duda, Barbara and Carol, Huberli and Brunner, Tillmann and Muller — comprise what could be called the Big Six of Paris. But lurking just behind is another contingent of teams who have come tantalizingly close to breaking through. They just haven’t won an Elite yet this season.
It wouldn’t be a surprise to see them do it in Paris.
Contenders to podium in Paris
At the beginning of the 2024 season, after one of the most successful years of their careers, Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson scrapped everything.
Those two golds they won in 2024, in Jurmala and Montreal? They could do better.
They sort of have, sort of haven’t.
The Canadians made the finals in Elite16s in Doha and Ostrava, falling to Barbara and Carol in the former, Cheng and Hughes in the latter. They’ve won 18 of their 26 matches this year and have just one finish outside of the top five. If ever there were a time for a Canadian women’s team to podium at the Olympics, 2024 is the year, and Brian Cook and TruVolley give them a 31.45% chance at doing just that — higher odds than even Cheng and Hughes.
Just behind them are the Netherlands’ Katja Stam and Raisa Schoon, who debuted in Tokyo as underdogs and will enter Paris as bona fide contenders to medal. They’ve medaled twice in Elite16s this year — silver in an excellent final in Tepic, bronze in a dominant win over Spaniards and TCU stars Daniela Alvarez and Tania Moreno in Espinho — and pushed Nuss and Kloth deep into the third set of the Gstaad quarterfinals, where they fell 15-13 to the eventual champs.
Falling into the close-but-no-Elite-gold category of 2024 are Latvians Tina Graudina and Anastasija Samoilova. The fourth-place Cinderellas of Tokyo, Graudina — who also played at USC — and Samoilova have since established themselves as one of the best teams in the world, and Graudina will be the flag-bearer for Latvia at the opening ceremonies. They’ve medaled in three out of their last four tournaments — silver at the Stare Jablonki Challenge, bronze in Ostrava, bronze in Gstaad — and also won a Challenge in Recife, Brazil, in March.
All of those teams, all that depth, and still: 85.07 percent chance of an American team on the podium.
That’s a number USA Volleyball fans can get excited about.
