HERMOSA BEACH, California — Brian Cook runs an unbiased, deeply metric-based volleyball analytical site called TruVolley. While Cook, an American who once competed for USA Volleyball and is married to Olympic gold medalist Kelsey Robinson-Cook, clearly has a leaning towards the USA, his program does not. It is a machine doing what machines do: Taking numbers, spinning them up, spitting them out. One million unemotional, unbiased simulations of the Olympic Games in all.
Which makes the numbers that produced regarding the upcoming Olympic Games all the more enticing for USA beach volleyball fans: 85.07 percent.
Those are the odds that either Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth, or Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes come home with an Olympic medal.
Unless your names are Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor, one does not get numbers such as those. That’s how strong the USA is entering the Paris Olympic Games, which begin on Saturday.
Nuss and Kloth enter as the No. 2 seed, Cheng and Hughes the 3. The only team seeded higher is Brazil’s Ana Patricia Silva and Duda Lisboa, who are currently on their worst skid as a team, with three straight tournaments without a podium and a ninth at the Gstaad Elite16, their lowest result since May of 2022.
Cheng and Hughes — the former USC teammates — and Nuss and Kloth — the former LSU pair — meanwhile, are on quite a different trend. Both will enter Paris having won the last event they played; Cheng and Hughes claimed gold at the Ostrava Elite16, where they beat Ana Patricia and Duda in the semifinals, and Nuss and Kloth won in Gstaad, their second consecutive gold medal after also winning at the Espinho Elite16.
It does not get any better than that, and it is a distinctly different feel from the Tokyo Games, where April Ross and Alix Klineman entered as heavy favorites — and delivered on those odds by winning gold — and Cheng and Sarah Sponcil were the plucky young kids seeded ninth who might upset a team or two.
Now the USA is in its best position to realistically win multiple medals since Walsh Jennings and May-Treanor beaet Ross and Jen Kessy in the London championship match.
Not that it will be easy. It never is in any tournament, much less one in which the elimination rounds are single-elimination, much less when the stakes are the highest they will…
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