Beach volleyball: Great mates walking on water

By PETER CALDER

When Natalie Cook spotted a gold-ribbed glass fishtank in a Brisbane pet shop last year, the Queensland-born beach volleyballer decided it would make a perfect cabinet for the gold medal she planned to win at the Olympics.

"What if you don't win gold?" the shop owner asked when she announced her intentions with the merchandise.

"Well," shot back the customer, "it would make a bloody good fish tank."

We may now be sure that Cook's fish tank won't ever have to hold water. In a stunning upset at the Bondi Beach stadium yesterday afternoon, Cook and her partner, Kerri Pottharst, watched a gentle fingertip lob by Brazilian Adriana Behar drop millimetres beyond the blue tape which marks the edge of the court - and collapsed in a pile to the sand as they absorbed the knowledge that the gold medal was theirs.

The Australians had surrounded themselves with gold on the way to winning it, in the belief that gold attracts gold, Cook said. In the room they share at the athletes' village, Cook has gold toothpaste and shampoo and the room is festooned with bric-a-brac and ornaments - including a gold Easter egg and a golden goblet - in the colour they wanted hanging round their suntanned necks by the end of the afternoon.

"It got to the point where people thought we were goofy," said Cook. "But we planned for a tidal wave to land on Bondi on September 25, and it must have worked."

That tidal wave swept away the hopes of the Brazilian duo, Behar and Shelda Bede, three times world champions and the current holders of that crown.

The big-serving Pottharst, who with one 85 km/h monster set a new world fastest for women, kept the Brazilians on the back foot. But the favourites also snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in a two-set match which they lost 12-11 and 12-10, in the process surrendering leads as large as five points in the first set and four in the second.

The Australians took the first set with a net serve - in volleyball, unlike tennis, they are legal - which dropped like a stone onto the Brazilians' side, far out of their reach.

It was the end of a long road back from Atlanta where the unheralded Australians took bronze in the game's Olympic debut after a 15-3 drubbing by a Brazilian pair, including Behar, had kept them out of the gold-medal match.

The 35-year-old Sydneysider Pottharst and Cook, 25, had broken up for a couple of years as the younger woman sought to assert herself against the more domineering Pottharst.

"It was a bit of a big-sister-little-sister thing," said Cook. "But she went ahead in leaps and bounds and I didn't do very well with the partner I chose. But now we're back together and we're the best of mates."

The pair employed a full-time coach and a physical trainer to help them on their path to the medal dais and had even consulted an American "success coach," Kurek Ashley, who had made them walk over piles of broken glass and pits of glowing coals as part of his campaign to instil in them an iron sense of self-belief.

"Kerri only did [the firewalking] once but I did it half a dozen times," a smiling Cook said after the match. "It's to do with taking you out of your comfort zone and when you walk across something which should, scientifically, burn you and it doesn't, you look back and say: 'Wow! What else is impossible that I can do'?"

The sands of Bondi were less than fiercely hot when the players took to the court for the final match under a muddy grey sky. In fact, it was goosebump weather courtside and the normally crowded beach outside the stadium was virtually empty.

The beach volleyball, which finishes on Tuesday with the men's medal matches, has been the focus of one of these Games' longest-running controversies. A small but vocal band of locals campaigned against the construction of the 10,000-seat complex which, they argued, destroyed the beach's amenity value and status as one of Sydney's iconic images.

At times, opponents muttered darkly about tearing the stadium down. But yesterday a largely Australian crowd, delirious with excitement as their golden girls snatched the most remarkable of victories, came close to doing it