As the winter Olympics came to a close this week in Sochi, summer Olympic athletes are starting to get the itch. It’s time for that two year push to Brazil in 2016 and to hopefully ramp toward the peak of each team’s abilities. The winter Olympics is not usually a place where you find talk of volleyball, but the recently elected president of the FIVB made an appearance and had a few things to say.


 

We’ve been getting glimpses into how Ary Graça does things through some of his choices. But fans are really not privy to the inner-workings of the new FIVB. So it was interesting to hear that our sport’s president was in Sochi talking about the future of volleyball.

His message was simple. He wants the sport of volleyball to be more of a part of the Olympic movement. In that vein, he plans to attend more Olympic events around the globe, not just volleyball events. He believes that becoming more of a part of the international Olympic movement will allow him to learn from federations much older than ours and get new ideas about how things should be done.

Seems he’s got quite a few ideas of his own that he already wants to implement. In speeches to the Russian International Olympic University, Graça said that when taking over from the Ruben Acosta regime which was followed by unelected interim president Jizhong Wei, he wanted to make the organization much more democratic than it has been in the past.

During his 24-year tenure, many believed Acosta ran the FIVB like a dictatorship and he was accused of corruption and nepotism among other things. 

For his part, Graça says he wants to open things up. He also wants volleyball to have a bigger presence on television, get marketed to younger players and he's planning to once again revamp a few of the rules.

There was no comprehensive list of things Graça wants to change. But the article about his speech mentions a couple of things to make the game even faster. He mentioned reducing the amount of time allowed between points and a limit on the amount of time team’s can take for substitutions. Apparently, that can sometimes take up to 2 minutes.

Neither of those changes is major, so they won’t change the game in ways that would have real repercussions as the ones we implemented in 1997 did. But it sounds like Graça is full of ideas, so keep an eye on the rule book as we go forward.

Graça also seemed very excited about the opportunities for volleyball in his home country of Brazil. With beach volleyball taking place on the historic Copacabana Beach at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, the possibilities for high profile exposure are endless. Indoor volleyball will most likely take a back seat to beach as it has since beach volleyball was included.

But with Brazil’s love of volleyball and its women’s team defending gold, there is ample opportunity to push indoor as well. The Brazilian men just barely missed out on gold, losing in the finals to Russia in an exciting five-set thriller to win silver. With those story lines, this Olympic Games in a country that is volleyball crazy, this could be a major boost for volleyball if played the right way by Graça and his new regime.

In fact, the Olympics should be a nice test to see if Graça is really serious about taking volleyball to the next level and if he’s really the one to take us there. He has two years to get these ideas implemented and to hype volleyball for Brazil in 2016. Hopefully, he can find a way to capitalize on the Olympic exposure in a way that the sport has not been able to in the past. 

If volleyball is to have an infusion of new fans and new coverage, now is the time to put it all in place. The time is right, the players are here, the opportunities abound. Now let’s see what we can do with them.

Brazil 2016, here we come.