( 4UMF NEWS ) Women’s Volleyball Team Wins Gold:
Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh have a good deal of practice at these celebrations, and so they knew where to look, where to walk, exactly where to find their families in the stands, how to wrap the flag around their mostly-naked bodies and still treat it respectfully.
They knew how to speak graciously to the awaiting cameras after their third successive gold medal in beach volleyball.
Walsh’s two little kids, Joey and Sundance, were grabbed from the stands to enjoy the moment, or at least to become part of it. The two champions chatted, held hands, sang the anthem.
Right up until a wooden interview area literally collapsed from the weight of newspaper reporters — nobody was hurt, just stunned — this was the smoothest of their three gold medal victories.
And yet…
“I give us a B,” said Walsh, after the 21-16, 21-16 victory over Americans Jennifer Kessy and April Ross. “There’s better in us, but who cares?”
Nobody cares right now, because these two women have now won 60% of all the beach volleyball titles ever awarded in the history of the Olympics.
They are one of those pairs of athletes born to play together, like Stockton and Malone, Tinker and Evers or Montana and Rice — only in bikinis.
The two women won this championship the same way they had captured all those other matches. The smaller May-Treanor dug and scrapped. She dinked winners creatively, brilliantly, with perfect placements. May-Treanor was the genius behind this duet, the architect and builder of points.
Walsh was the finisher, the killer, the spiker.
The match stayed even, with neither side able to hold serve very often, until 13-13 of the first set. Then Walsh tipped a winner, spiked a winner, tipped another winner during the next four points. The champs had their lead and would never give back the edge.
Ross and Kessy served harder, struck the ball harder. They just weren’t as canny, or as tactical. In the end, Ross knocked a serve long at matchpoint.
“They squashed us,” Ross said. “They never let us back in.”
