Beijing Olympics: Japan Men's and Women's National Volleyball Teams

Well, so far the men's team are winless, having just lost a five-setter to host China late last night and still have the undefeated U.S. team and a winless Venezuela. The women are 2-1, their only loss coming to the U.S. but still have undefeated Cuba and the host team in their way to the elimination round.

It looks like the men are statistically out of it. They would need to win their last two matches and have either Italy, Bulgaria or China lose all their remaining matches. And even then, I don't know what the tie-breaker would be.

The women are on better ground. If they win one more match, I believe they're in although it wouldn't hurt if Poland and Venezuela keep losing.

But hey, I don't think that people are coming here looking for results. They're looking for the pretty pretty pictures. Well, rather than right click a bunch of Reuters photos, I'll just point people in the right direction:

Japan Volleyball Association Men's Senior Team
Japan Volleyball Association Women's Senior Team
Both teams at the Mainichi Daily News
Yahoo Japan's Beijing Volleyball Photo Gallery
A lot of players play in the V. League, Japan's highest level of pro volleyball
Photo gallery of the Women's Team
Men's team member Takahiro Yamamoto
Men's team member Yu Koshikawa
Miyuki Takahashi (Shin) Livedoor photo gallery
Megumi Kurihara (Princess Megu)'s Blog
More Women's photos at Sponichi
Nikan Sports Photo gallery

By the way, Japan volleyball keeps the Japanese tradition of naming their national teams after their current coaches. Thus Japanese announcers may refer to the Women's team as Yanagimoto Japan for their coach, Shoichi Yanagimoto. Likewise, the men are Ueta Japa for coach Tatsuya Ueta.

A quick word about the Beijing 2008 Olympics and Shunsuke Nagasaki 長崎峻侑 と 北京オリンピック

Since people (the two of them know who they are) have been coming here looking for information, I'd like to clear something up.

Unfortunately for SASUKE (Ninja Warrior) fans, Shunsuke Nagasaki (長崎峻侑) will not be in Beijing representing Japan. Japan's two men's trampoline spots went to Ueyama Yasuhiro 上山容弘 and Sotomura Tetsuya 外村哲也.

Ueyama and Sotomura are currently ranked 1st and 9th in the world respectively in the men's individual (Shunsuke is 18th) and together are ranked 1st in the men's synchro (there is only an individual competition in this year's Olympics).

G4 and TBS must have hyped Shunsuke up enough that people began to assume that he was automatically going to be competing in Beijing, thus the confusion.

Still, we should support the trampoline event because if it spreads in popularity the event can be increased to include the synchro event and give Shunsuke (and his coach, former SASUKE regular and Muscle Musical participant Nakata Daisuke 中田大輔) more chances to compete in future Olympic events.

The trampoline event (men's and women's) will be held between August 16th and 19th.

Links:
International Gymnastics Federation home page (find rankings and info there).
Broadcast schedule in Japan.
Broadcast schedule in the US.