GOING FOR BROKE! BY JOHN PLUMMER Beach volleyball is one of the hardest sports you will ever play. Ask Olympic Gold Medallist Natalie Cook! When beach volleyball emerged in the 1980s, it’s probably fair to say that its appeal was more aesthetic than athletic. Any discussion of the subtleties of the game tended to get lost amid a sea of tanned butts. For more than a decade the sport continued to be dismissed as little more than a playground for wannabe models and voyeuristic fans. Then came Sydney 2000. As the Olympics began and Australia held its breath, Natalie Cook and Kerri-Ann Pottharst delivered the nation’s first gold medal on the beach and lit the torchlight on an unforgettable summer of sport for the world in general and the hosts in particular. Their victory, achieved appropriately on the golden sand of Bondi beach, was memorable as much for the quality of the action as the quality of eye candy. In front of 10,000 frenzied fans the Aussies fought tigerishly to defeat Brazilian world champions Adriana Behar and Shelda Bede 12-11, 12-10. The action was fast, the determination was furious and the skill level undeniable. The physiques were equally surprising. Far from being the soft beach babes of folklore, the women were muscular and supremely agile. In little more than an hour, Pottharst and Cook became Olympic heroines and spiked a whole host of myths about beach volleyball. Of the 10,651 athletes in Sydney, it’s doubtful whether any did more to elevate their sport than the Aussie duo. “When Australians remember Sydney 2000 they think of Ian Thorpe in the pool, Cathy Freeman on the track and the beach volleyball girls,” says Cook, 28. “Now when I walk down the street people say ‘hey, you’re the volleyballer’. The profile of the sport has increased dramatically.” Beach volleyball actually dates back almost a century. There are reports of it being played in Santa Monica, California, and in French nudist resorts during the 1920s. But until TV took an interest for not entirely sporting reasons in the 1980s, it remained outside most people’s consciousness. Cook, who represented Australia as a junior in regular volleyball before she graduated to the beach, admits that when she took up the game in the early 1990s it still hadn’t come far. “Back then beach volleyball was a social sport at the weekend where you would have a beer and watch the girls in their bikinis,” she says. A decade ago the women’s tour consisted of three or four events and prize money was minimal. The 2003 tour had $2.5 million in prize money. “When I won my first event at 19, I received $4,000 and thought all my Christmases had come at once,” says Cook. “Now the tour consists of 13 events, with more planned next year, and each one is worth at least $150,000." Above all, it’s become "a respectable sport that kids want to get into”, says Cook. The x-factor undoubtedly was the International Olympic Committee’s announcement in 1993 that beach volleyball would be added to the games programme in Atlanta in 1996. “They call it the five-ring fever and that’s exactly what it is,” says Cook, who as an 18-year-old was herself swayed to switch volleyball codes by the IOC decision. “To wear your track suit for your country and represent it is awesome. To win a medal on top of that is a huge bonus.” Cook’s first taste of Olympic metal came in 1996 when she and Pottharst won bronze. “Being involved in Atlanta made me want to go back for more,” she says. They set their stall out to go for it 100 per cent at Sydney and by summer 2000 knew they had a realistic chance. As the pre-games excitement mounted and expectations grew, the challenge became more mental than physical. “The hardest thing about the Olympics is getting it right on the day and dealing with the stress and pressure of doing that,” says Cook. “I don’t think about things going wrong,” she says. “I only think about getting it right and being positive.” Cook needed every shred of positivity during the final when she and Pottharst came within a point of losing the first set. The second set was almost as close before the Aussies prevailed. “It was a one-and-a-quarter hour battle with the Brazilians that went back and forth,” she says. “It was incredibly emotional. And when you feel something it stays with you forever.” It’s hardly surprising that the countries with the best beaches and sporting cultures tend to produce the best players. America and Brazil are the leading nations while Europe lags behind. On a recent promotional tour of the UK, the Aussie team couldn’t find a single beach volleyball court to practise on. “In the end we had to use an indoor basketball court,” says Cook, whose grandparents were born in Croydon, England. As the sport has grown so too have the physiques. Cook is built – at more than six feet tall and 11-stone she can generate considerable power. Her new playing partner, Nicole Sanderson, is another six-foot Amazon. “People are surprised at how strong we are, especially through the legs,” says Cook. “A lot of volleyball players have strong legs because you have to jump out of the sand.” Anyone who has tried exercising on sand will know what she means. Sand provides greater resistance than most surfaces on which sport is played so it saps your energy much quicker. It also makes it harder to jump, which is a fundamental requirement of beach volleyball. Clearly, matchstick legs are no good to Olympians. You also need upper body strength after take-off to put the ball away powerfully but because you have to move fast you also have to avoid unnecessary bulk. The secret is a high strength-to-weight ratio. “Beach volleyball is one of the hardest sports you will ever play,” says Cook. “The ball is constantly moving. You need to combine with other people and when you jump to spike there’s no part of you on the ground. That requires timing, balance, power and knowing where your opponent is, If you are strong and powerful you don’t have to focus on that part, you just focus on balance and rhythm.” Cook and Sanderson cultivate their strength and power through thrice-weekly weights sessions in the gym. Each session lasts about 90 minutes. “The focus changes according to the time of the year,” says Cook. “Sometimes it’s a strength phase and sometimes it’s a power phase.” There are no fancy training splits: every workout targets all the major muscle groups. “Because we have a lot of training to get through in a week it has to be a full body workout,” says Cook. She does three to four sets of eight exercises, performing between four to 10 reps each set. Her training is split into phases, depending on whether she’s trying to add strength or power, which is why the number of reps varies: if she’s training purely for strength she does fewer reps. Cook’s current weights programme begins with power cleans, an excellent weightlifting move for increasing explosive power, to a maximum weight of 60kg. She then does either half squats to 110kg max or leg press to 160kg max. The next time someone tells you beach volleyball players aren’t proper athletes ask them if they can half-squat 110kg. She continues by training chest with seated machine presses followed by incline presses for upper chest, for which she holds a 22.5kg dumbbell in each hand. Then it’s seated pulley rows, lat pulldowns and chins for back followed by one of a variety of shoulder exercises using light weights to stabilise rather than build the deltoids. Once her weights session is finished she does 15 minutes of abdominal exercises, often using the Swiss ball. While muscle is a by-product of her lifting programme, it isn’t something she specifically trains for. Indeed, she is careful not to get too big in certain areas, which is why she does hardly any heavy shoulder exercises and no arm workouts. To generate power to put the ball away requires speed and timing rather than bulky biceps. “In beach volleyball you need strong, quick legs and fast, dynamic shoulders,” says Cook. With games sometimes lasting more than an hour, players need good cardiovascular fitness. Cook acquires a certain amount of aerobic conditioning during her five practice sessions each week on sand. Each session lasts between two to two-and-a-half hours and although the focus is on improving the technical side of the game, being active on sand for long periods is useful grooming for match situations. Cook supplements her cardio work with two or three aerobic sessions a week. The keywords here are ‘variety’ and ‘fun’. “If you don’t find something new in your training you will get bored,” she says. Running in water is one of her favourites. Water provides even more resistance than sand. “It’s impossible to go fast,” she says. “In a half hour session I might only do four laps of the pool.” There is another reason for training this way. “It takes gravity off the joints so it’s recovery and aerobics all in one,” she says. She also does yoga and kickboxing. “I did tae kwon do as a kid,” she says. “So I just kick the shit out of my instructor and he does the same to me.” Her immediate sporting goal is to do something similar to her opponents in at the 2004 Olympics in Athens and win back-to-back gold medals. The partnership with Sanderson is beginning to gel. They started 2003 ranked outside the world top 20 and ended it at number four. In the long term, she has started her own company, Sandstorm, to bring beach volleyball to more people. “My goal is to make sure as many Aussie kids as possible have the same opportunity as I have had to play beach volleyball and travel the world,” she says. Although the sport has moved on, Cook isn’t averse to injecting a little old fashioned sex appeal into things if she thinks it will help to broaden its appeal. No matter how far the sport has come there’s no point denying the sight of athletic babes in bikinis on beaches will always be sexy. “The sex appeal definitely brings people to the beach,” she says. “If they come looking for it, they get it. Then when they get here they appreciate the sport for what it is. The sexiness is just a bonus.” M&F

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