PARIS — The U.S. women’s volleyball team had a bad enough start in its Olympic title defense. It managed to keep it from turning into a disaster.
The Americans lost the first two sets to China on Monday in a pool play format where total points and sets won can become playoff tiebreakers. China’s eventual five-set victory — both teams scored the same number of points — left the reigning champions with a sense of relief.
“I’m really proud of our fight. You know, it’s not easy to go from being down 0-2 to fight neck and neck in the fifth like that,” setter Jordyn Poulter said. “You either win or you learn. So we have a lot of that we can learn from here, a lot that we can improve and get better at, and we don’t want to peak too early.”
They definitely didn’t have to worry about that.
“We obviously didn’t have the start that we wanted, but the third, fourth and fifth were really promising,” blocker Haleigh Washington said. “Going five with a team like China is incredible, and squeezing out any point we can get in the pool is going to be really important for us. And so, I’m just happy the way that we just fought.”
The American women will play their second match of the preliminary round on Wednesday against Serbia, and then meet host France on Sunday in the pool play finale. The top two teams in each of the three pools and the top two third-place teams will advance to the knockout round, with wins, total points and set and point ratio used as tiebreakers.
“It just highlights how thin the margins are and how we have to take care of some of these little plays,” coach Karch Kiraly said. “And I want to give our team a huge amount of credit for fighting back. It is not easy to come back from down 2-0 against a really good China team.”
The Americans only lost one match in pool play in Tokyo and did not lose a set in the knockout stage en route to their first gold medal. With eight holdovers from the 2020 champions, they arrived in Paris as the fifth-ranked team in the world.
But sixth-ranked China won the first two sets handily, 25-20 and 25-19, before the Americans came back to win the third 25-17 and rallied from a 13-10 deficit to tie it 13-all on a challenged ball that barely caught the Chinese end line.
For the first time, the crowd was engaged and chanting “U-S-A!” and at 17-14, China took a timeout to regroup. It was 21-20 for the Americans when they ran off the last four points, getting an ace from Washington to set up set point.
On the winner, Washington’s dig set up Andrea Drews’ spike.
But China again took the lead in the tiebreaker. The Americans staved off two match points before Zhu Ting’s spike went off blocker Drews for the victory.