Brazalians love their beach volleyball

Rio's Fort Copacabana stretch was created for beach volleyball. It has been a party all on its own, with a mini Maracana Stadium created at the end of the beach.

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FORT COPACABANA – Rio's Fort Copacabana stretch was created for beach volleyball. It has been a party all on its own, with a mini Maracana Stadium created at the end of the beach, before the location changes to the hipsterville of Rio, Botafogo.

While the full-size Maracana Stadium, in downtown Rio, hasn't delivered on its promise for dual gold medals for the hosts, things are going swimmingly on the beach.

Just before last night's bell chimed midnight, the women's finals were to be played out on the throbbing beachfront.

The scenes at the 'Copa', on game night, are everything the advert tells you about Brazil and Rio.

They don't care much for clothing and, when the weather is as searing as it was yesterday, the samba beat is ratcheted up several notches.

The music can be heard for miles, as it demands those on the outside to pull in.

Brazilians are famous for their football, but as they go through a football malaise, their handball, their volleyball, their pole vault - heck, even their kayaking has had to shoulder the burden of expectation.

The women's football team started like a house on fire, but the expectation on Marta's shoulders proved too much.

There was one picture that best illustrated the impact of the women's football here in Rio.

A boy wearing a Brazil mumber 10 shirt, with Neymar's name crossed out. Below it, that of Marta had been scribbled in. But events may have required the Neymar to be reinstated on the boy's back.

As it stands, the Barcelona maverick and the Brazilian men's football team are still in the hunt for gold, after their 6-0 hammering of Honduras in the semi-finals yesterday, at the self-same magician's stage, the Maracana Stadium. Neymar opened the floodgates after just 14 seconds, and they will have their shot at ultimate redemption come the weekend.

Marta and company can only deliver bronze, when they tackle Canada on Friday night. It is a match of importance, yes, but South Africans know only too well how hollow the Sevens victory over Japan felt. It is just not the same as going for gold, and the fizz soon evaporates, and thoughts float wearily back to what went wrong in the semi-final.

Pole vault, of course, delivered a gold medal of some significance, one so important that the hosts saw fit to boo off the French challenge to the Brazilian throne.

They were unapologetic about it either, heavyhanded though it was. In their minds, the hold mattered more.

Long after the apologies have been accepted, the Olympic record books for 2016 will still say that Thiago Braz Da Silva won gold.

Now, they are yearning for a final flourish, a rousing belting of the national anthem to a big crowd, somewhere, anywhere.

To this point, the mini-Maracana has delivered the roars. It takes over an hour in Rio's ridiculous traffic to make the trek from the Olympic Park Precinct to the Copacabana beach. But, stars from many other sports have made the effort to come and take a peak at the volleyball station, where the party doesn't seem to keep business hours.

Wednesday night, they would have partied again and, maybe, just maybe, sang in another gold medal for the party hosts.

In place of the shirts of Marta and Neymar, the groupies on Copacabana simply pen the names of the sand heroes on their backs, and wash them off in the ocean when the time comes to move on.

All over Copacabana, bare-chested Brazilians marched, with Barbara (Seixas) and Agatha (Bednarczuk) on their backs. It would be too formal to use surnames, in a sport that frowns upon collars and shoes.

Oh, and before that gold medal scrap, there was the small matter of the men's quarter-final between the hosts, and their sworn enemies, Argentina.

Beach volleyball is as Brazilian as it gets, and nowhere else in the world does it like they do it on the Copa. - Independent Media