Lausanne, August 4, 2008 - After nearly 15 months of competition featuring men's and women's qualifying for the 2008 Olympics, the SWATCH FIVB World Tour will take a break for three weeks as the world's top Beach Volleyball players head for the Beijing Summer Games.

With the completion of the sixth and final SWATCH FIVB World Tour Grand Slam event on the 2008 calendar this past weekend in Austria, the international Beach Volleyball community now focuses on the Beijing competition starting Saturday in the Chinese capital with the finals set August 21 for women and August 22 for men.

After the three week break, the circuit SWATCH FIVB World Tour resumes in Norway August 25-31 for their second double gender stop in the Scandinavian country this season followed by single-gender events in Mallorca (men) and Poland (Myslowice, women) the next weekend with the men and women reuniting in mid-September in Guarujà, Brazil.

The Beijing 2008 Olympic field will feature 24-team fields for both men and women with the gold-medal teams from the Athens Summer Games returning to defend their titles at the 12,200-seat Chaoyang Park Beach Volleyball Ground.

Three-time SWATCH FIVB world champions Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh of the United States headline the women's field as the Athens 2004 gold-medal winners enter the Beijing 2008 Olympics with a 62-match winning streak along with winning their last nine SWATCH FIVB World Tour starts.

Emanuel Rego and Ricardo Santos are the featured team in the men's competition as the Brazilians finished second in the Beijing qualifying competition behind 2007 SWATCH FIVB world champions Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers of the United States. However, Emanuel and Ricardo won the last meeting between the two teams with a gold-medal victory this past June in Berlin.

Teams started arriving at the Chaoyang Park competition site last week where the Beach Volleyball ground contains 17,000 tons of fine sand transported from Hainan. Construction for the facility was started December 28, 2005 and was completed for an "Olympic" test event for women in August 2007.

"This is the environment I love competing in - the big stadium, the big crowds - and it's all with the Olympic rings," said Australian Natalie Cook, the only men's or women's player to compete in the "final fours" at the previous three Summer Games competition in Atlanta, Sydney and Athens.

The 33-year-old Cook, who won the bronze in 1996 in Atlanta before capturing Olympic gold at the Sydney 2000 Summer Games with Kerri Pottharst, is competing in Beijing with Tamsin Barnett. The pair will be seeded 10th in the Beijing 2008 Olympics and will compete in the preliminary part of the competition with a pool made up of teams from Brazil, Georgia and Russia.

Barnett is competing in the Olympics for the second time after being a part of Australia's Volleyball team in Sydney. The 28-year-old Barnett likes her team's chances for an Olympic medal as she feels her team "is one of the only pairs that have focused our last year and half purely on the Olympic Games, so we've played a lot less tournaments to make sure that we're healthy for this event. I think it's really been to our benefit."

Following six days of pool play from August 9 through August 14, the top 16 men's and women's teams from group competition will advance to the single-elimination bracket where three rounds will be played leading to the medal matches to determine the podium placers.

(Credit: FIVB)