Beach Volleyball Revisited

One of my favorite posts is one I wrote during the 2004 Olympics on beach volleyball. I noted that the Yahoo News slide show on Olympic beach volleyball included a remarkable 194 photos, three of which I reproduced. This was my comment on one of them:

I’ve long been aware of volleyball, but I had no idea what a cerebral sport it is. The girl in this photo isn’t just adjusting her shorts, she is signalling a play to her teammate.

Regrettably, during one of our subsequent database moves those pictures were lost. In the meantime, however, that particular photo became rather famous. It was one of the first that came up when you searched Google Images, and I noted in 2008, again during the Olympics, that in the preceding 24 hours more than 3,000 web surfers had found their way to Power Line via “women’s beach volleyball” image searches.

Those particular images have now receded from memory, but they are easily replaced, especially since the Sun has posted an enormous number of photos of this year’s competition, including this one:

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It’s always nice to see a sport retain its popularity. But there is a new twist in this year’s Olympics: regulations on clothing have been relaxed. This photo is of a match between the German and Egyptian teams:

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Whether this represents a step forward or a step backward is, I guess, in the eye of the beholder.

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