Cuba, Sweden, and why pool play must go

Cuba didn’t deserve that. Jorge Alayo and Noslen Diaz became the story of beach volleyball in these Olympic Games when they not only upset their way to a Pool D win but looked very much the part of the favorites to do so, sweeping Andy Benesh and Miles Partain, Brazil’s George Wanderley and Andre Loyola, […]

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Cuba didn’t deserve that.

Jorge Alayo and Noslen Diaz became the story of beach volleyball in these Olympic Games when they not only upset their way to a Pool D win but looked very much the part of the favorites to do so, sweeping Andy Benesh and Miles Partain, Brazil’s George Wanderley and Andre Loyola, and tacking on the expected victory over Morocco. After those three matches, Alayo led the tournament in blocks per set. Diaz, the tallest defender in the field, was tremendous, a Giannis Antetokounmpo on sand.

Their reward?

Drawing Sweden, the best team in the world, the pair who has made 10 straight finals, in the first round of the playoffs.

How does this happen?

Pool play.

The current format of the Olympic Games is a round-robin style pool play in which the four teams in each pool all play one another. The top three teams break pool, with the two best third-place teams, as determined by set and point differential, beginning in the round of 16.

Because Sweden’s win, over Australians Mark Nicolaidis and Izac Carracher, came in a sweep and one of their losses — to Qatar’s Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan — came in a three-setter, they began playoffs in the round of 16.

The same round where all of the 3-0 teams began.

To call the system unfair, as many have, is not my favorite verbiage. It’s a fair system in that it’s equally unfair to everyone. Cuba could have gone 1-2 in pool play — as the on-paper seeding would have expected — and drawn a 3-0 Swedish team and few would have blinked an eye about it. In that sense, it is fair.

But it is unjust.

A team with two losses and one win should not be in the same position as a team with three wins.

Cuba was unjustly punished for winning pool and playing arguably the best beach volleyball of any team through the first three matches. Sweden was unjustly rewarded for playing their worst beach volleyball in more than a calendar year.

This presents one of the many issues with pool play: there are oftentimes little to no consequences for losing, and little to no benefit to winning.

There is occasionally an incentive to lose.

Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers had no intention on losing their opening round of pool play to Latvian youngsters Aleksandrs Samoilovs and Martins Plavins in Beijing of 2008. Indeed, the heavy favorites to medal in Beijing very much desired to win.

They didn’t, and the 21-19, 21-18 stunner is still considered the greatest upset in Olympic beach volleyball history.

It was also, unbeknownst to them at the time, the best thing that could have happened.

That loss, and subsequent pair of wins in their next two matches, earned them one of the easiest routes to a gold medal match imaginable. In the three ensuing rounds, Dalhausser and Rogers played the 20 seed, the 8 and the 15 to make it to the gold medal match against Brazil. Their semifinal was not against Emanuel and Ricardo, or Jake Gibb and Sean Rosenthal, or Fabio and Marcio, but … Georgia.

Georgia?

Georgia.

“The stars aligned,” Dalhausser said years ago.

And they aligned because they lost.

Eight years later, in Rio, the opposite happened. Dalhausser and Nick Lucena took care of business in pool play, winning all three matches, as was expected of the No. 3 seed and arguably best team in the world. The problem then was that Alison Cerutti and Bruno Schmidt, the No. 1 seed also with a firm case for the best team in the world, did not. Upset by Austrians Alex Horst and Clemens Doppler — “bad, bad,” Alison still says, laughing and shaking his head about that match — Alison and Bruno were now on the other end of the bracket, with Dalhausser and Lucena.

When the two powers met, then, the match many considered the de facto gold medal match wasn’t for a medal at all, but for fifth. Alison and Bruno won that match and went on to win the gold medal.

Dalhausser and Lucena, winners of four straight by that point in Rio, didn’t deserve that matchup any more than Cuba did on Sunday in Paris.

The reality of the Olympics, and the pool play format in which it is played, is that Dalhausser and Lucena would have been better off losing a match in Rio.

Same as Cuba in Paris.

But because this is the Olympic Games, no team will outright forfeit in an attempt to improve their draw (although, in the past, there has been an incentive to forfeit, something that has since been rectified, with teams winning one point for a loss and zero for a forfeit). Such is not the case in Challenge events on the Beach Pro Tour.

Those who have followed the Beach Pro Tour are not unfamiliar with the rash of forfeits that occur in the second round of pool play between two teams who won their first match. Win or lose, both teams will begin playoffs in the round of 16. Players frequently opt to rest instead, choosing the benefit of taking a match off their legs instead of the “improved seeding” that may or may not come with winning pool.

In many cases, teams will do the math and attempt to forfeit faster than the other team, because they know finishing second in pool is actually more beneficial than winning.

This exact scenario played out in the Haikou Challenge last fall. Two teams — I won’t mention who — understood that the only way they’d play Spain’s Adrian Gavira and Pablo Herrera — arguably the best team in the tournament — in the first round was if they won pool. So they played rock, paper, scissors, both teams wanting to lose, because losing was in effect an improvement upon their seed in the playoff rounds.

Welcome to sports competed in a pool play format, ladies and gentlemen.

There is a solution. An easy one, too. A format in which such messes are not found: Double-elimination tournaments.

Every match in a double-elimination format has both rewards and consequences. Win, and you advance further into the tournament. Lose, and you sentence yourself to a long grind through the loser’s bracket.

It is just, rewarding winners, punishing losers.

There is the chance, of course, in a double-elimination format that two top-seeded teams are upset and meet earlier than otherwise would be expected in an elimination round.

To me, that’s a just system.

Winners move on. Losers don’t.

That’s sports.

Pool play is hardly sport.

It renders many — the majority, in fact — of matches hardly more than exhibitions. Few consequences. Few rewards. Just theater for theater’s sake.

The 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, the first in which beach volleyball was an Olympic sport, was played in a double-elimination format.

I don’t know why we ever went away from it, but I do know this: It’s time we go back.

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