FIVB World Grand Prix – An overview
Year 2012 will see the FIVB Volleyball World Grand Prix complete its 20 editions since the time it first held matches way back in 1993. The tournament has successfully produced 19 champions so far, with the final round of the current championship to be played from June 27 till July 1, 2012.
The World Grand Prix, which is an annual international tournament for women, follows a similar pattern as the World League, a FIVB annual international championship for men which was started three years prior to the World Grand Prix. The purpose of the World Grand Prix was to create popularity for the sport of volleyball in general and particularly among women.
The FIVB World Grand Prix tournament takes place in two main stages. The first stage is the preliminary round while the second one is the final round. The preliminary round is further sub divided into phases with matches taking place over the weekend in various cities of the world. The preliminary round of the current World Grand Prix has been divided into three phases. Each phase holds pool matches with one particular city playing host to one pool.
Every team in the pool gets a chance to play all the other teams in the same pool. When the preliminary round of the tournament reaches its close, the participating teams qualify for the final round based on their total number of points earned during the round. The top teams qualify to take part in the final round while the rest are eliminated. However, the host team of the final round gets to be in the final round based on the fact that it is the host team.
In the current FIVB World Grand Prix tournament, China has already qualified to be in the final round as it is being staged in Ningbo, China. Apart from China, five other teams will be earning a spot in the final round of the competition. This will be the third time that Ningbo will play host to the World Grand Prix final round.
The teams that have been able to earn a spot in the ongoing World Grand Prix championship so far other than China are Turkey and Thailand.
The coach of the Turkish squad, Motta Marco Aurelio, expressed his happiness at making it to the final round in the following words, “Like my captain said we are very happy, as this is our first time to qualify for the finals. It’s our eighth match in this World Grand Prix, and we won seven matches, losing only against Cuba. I hope tomorrow we can finish well [against Germany].”
Over the entire length of the championship, Brazil has been able to win the title match the most times. In all, Brazil has become the champion of the tournament eight times. Other than that, Brazil also holds the record of winning the championship three times in a row. This took place in the years 2004, 2005 and 2006. USA has been able to bag the title match twice in row and is currently the defending champion. In the event that USA wins the championship this year as well, it will equal the record of Brazil for winning the title match three consecutive times.
It is not certain which team will bag the championship this time but US has a fair chance as it is currently the top ranked team in the tournament.
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