With the drawing of lots for the Beijing Olympics volleyball tournament completed in Beijing on Wednesday, the International Federation de Volleyball (FIVB) is considering another draw to help decide the lineup of the quarterfinals.
"We may have another draw at the end of the preliminaries to decide half of the quarterfinal clashes," said Wei Jizhong, first executive vice-president of the FIVB, at a press conference after Wednesday's draw.
The official draw was conducted Wednesday afternoon at the Capital Indoor Stadium, the main volleyball venue during the Beijing Games, as twelve qualified teams in each tournament were divided equally into Pools A and B for the preliminaries with a serpentine system based on world ranking used to determine the composition of the pools.
"In the quarterfinals, top finishers from preliminary Pool A will play fourth finishers from Pool B while fourth finishers from Pool B are to clash with top finishers from Pool A," Wei elaborated to the journalists.
"But another draw may be needed to decide quarterfinals among the second and third finishers from the preliminaries, and this would be different from previous Olympic volleyball tournaments."
The potential change, which will be discussed at a FIVB meeting in Dubai on Monday and Tuesday, is aimed to ensure fair play in the preliminaries, according to Wei.
"At the Athens Games, some team lost some preliminary games intentionally in order to choose its opponent in the knock-out stage, and thus the FIVB received a lot of criticism," Wei added. "We would like to prevent similar things from happening in Beijing."
According to the draw for the day by day schedule of Olympic volleyball matches, which was completed in front of some 100 journalists from China and abroad, the Chinese women's volleyball team will start its title-defending journey from August 9 by playing lowly-ranked Venezuela.
Following matches against Poland and Cuba, China will have a high profile meeting with the Americans led by former Chinese women's volleyball legend Lang Ping on August 15 while the preliminary matches for the host will conclude on August 17 with Japan to face.
Much less ambitious than the Chinese women's team, the Chinese men will have to play their best against Venezuela and Japan on August 12 and August 14 respectively to fight for a chance to enter the quarterfinals.
Top four finishers from each preliminary round-robin group will advance to the quarterfinals.
(Xinhua News Agency June 12, 2008)