Netherlands claim final Olympic ticket

Madrid, Spain, May 30, 2004 – The Netherlands claimed the final berth at the 2004 Olympics in Athens after beating Spain 3-0 (25-20, 25-20, 26-24) to win the World Olympic Qualification tournament in Madrid on Sunday.

The 1996 Olympic champions lived up to their pre-tournament tag of favourites to finish the competition unbeaten with three impressive victories and none more so than the win over Spain.

Once again the Dutch displayed an awesome combination of power and urgency to stem any thought Spain had of causing an upset and charged towards Olympic qualification, which was guaranteed once the Netherlands had won two sets, much to the joy of their passionate fans.

“I’m very pleased,” Netherlands captain Reinder Nummerdor said. “After yesterday’s match it wasn’t easy to build up the tension but we managed to start just the way we played yesterday and that was the key to winning the first set after that it was much easier. After the second set it was an incredible feeling.”

“What’s to say other than we are happy that we qualified,” Netherlands coach Bert Goedkoop said. “We played a pretty good tournament. In the first match against Cameroon we weren’t really focused, yesterday’s match we built up the tension and today we played pretty well in the first two sets.

“Now it is hard to say how we will go at the Olympics. If we reached the level of today we must rise further to beat the top teams, but now we have a mix of experienced and young players and we have a little time to go until the Olympics so if we have to get our players into shape we might end up quite high.”

Netherlands finished the tournament top of the standings with six points followed by Cuba with five, Spain with four and winless Cameroon with three points.

Earlier, Cuba, needing a victory to stay in contention for the Olympics, completed a hard fought 3-0 (25-20, 25-23, 25-13) victory over Cameroon. However, the South Americans needed Spain to beat the Netherlands to have any chance of being in the Olympic qualification calculation.

The Madrid tournament completes the Olympic qualification process for men’s Volleyball at the Olympics, which start on August 14. The Netherlands will compete for Olympic gold with 11 other teams including Greece, Brazil, Italy, Serbia and Montenegro, Russia, USA, Argentina, Tunisia, Poland, France and Australia.

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