Farewell To Cuba's Beach Volleyball Aces, The Least Nervous Athletes In Rio

On the first set point of the second set of their quarterfinal match against Russia's Konstantin Semenov and Viacheslav Krasilnikov on Monday night, Cuba's Nivaldo Nadhir Diaz Gomez had a volleyball driven off his face at a very high rate of speed. It hit his nose or mouth; honestly it was hard to say via livestream, although the steak-dropped-on-a-floor Foley art that came with the impact registered quite clearly. It was obvious, wherever it landed, that Diaz didn't enjoy it much more than any other non-Olympian would have. He popped his eyes and rubbed his hand over his face and got back to work.

The Cubans did not win that point—though Diaz and partner Sergio Reynaldo Gonzalez Bayard routinely saved points with their feet in earlier matches, the most stunningly chill beach volleyball duo in Rio have yet to figure out how to win a point with their faces. They won their set a few points later, then dropped the third. It was their first loss in five games in Rio, and their last. The Russians moved on to the semifinals around midnight on the east coast, last seen screaming "da" into each other's ears at jet-engine volume. The Cubans collapsed on the sand, got up, and left. Diaz is 22 and Gonzalez is 27, and while neither will get a medal this time around, both at least ensured that they will not soon be seeded 21st in a 24-team field again.

Before we go any further, I should mention that I have no idea what I'm talking about. I enjoy watching volleyball every four years unless there is something I enjoy watching more—basketball or swimming or Bar Rescue—on another channel, although I understand the sport in the way that you understand the language in which you once got C's a decade or so after high school. I have some broad sense of what's going on, and I notice some familiar rhythms and enjoy them, but mostly I am inferring and guessing my ass off: leaning heavily on context and other back-channels, grasping at helpful homonyms like a drowning man pawing a buoy, and generally trying to make a strange thing somehow and somewhat more like the things I know and understand. It didn't work any better in the land of beach volleyball than it ever did for me in Europe, but in both cases I got by well enough to eat, and went home happy.

The rules of beach volleyball, it turns out, are easy to understand, mostly because you can do pretty much whatever—stick out your foot to save a shot headed towards the sand, even duck under the net to the opposing side to save an errant set if it's outside the boundaries—except for 1) let the ball land inbounds on your side, or 2) make it land out of bounds on the other. The combination of this open mandate and all that open sand to attack should, by rights, foster an open-ended and creative game; if you can do whatever, what else are you really going to do? In practice, at least from what I was able to translate, that's not how it works.

The men's beach volleyball players are as a rule buff and bellowing, and while the fact that there are only two of them out there cuts down some on the relentless feints and fake-outs of the team game, beach volleyball still tends toward a sort of overdetermined testosteronality. Points are to be won with maximum violence, and celebrated at the highest voltage allowable by law. The powerful ambient whiff of money that you get from well-funded European teams across the Olympic spectrum is very much in evidence—NBC's broadcasters noted that Austrians Alexander Horst and Clemens Doppler, whom the Cubans calmly swept out of the tournament in the Round of 16, practice in Vienna on a replica of Rio's Copacabana set-up that's precise down to the type of sand. But there is, more than that, a deeper and more theatrical overstatement to the whole enterprise.

This is what made the Cubans stand out, and what made me decide to seek their matches out after I happened upon them after some idle flipping. When I found them, they had already dispatched a Brazilian pair that was ranked fourth in the event in their first match, and were in the process of beating a pair of Latvians that had won the 2013 and 2014 world championships. They beat Canada's best team after that to end pool play undefeated, and then dispatched the Austrians. This was impressive enough just given their seeding, although was more of an honest mistake than anything else: Diaz and Gonzalez do not have enough funding to play on beach volleyball's World Tour, and as such both the teams playing them and the people endeavoring to rank those teams were likely very unfamiliar of them and quite possibly had never seen them play before.

What made the duo so thrilling to watch, though, was less the surprise of their success than the simple thrill of watching them do it in the way they did. This is because Diaz and Gonzalez, too, played as if they'd never seen their peacocking peers play, or at the very least had seen it and thought better of trying to do the same thing. Because we cannot embed any video, and because many of their matches were buried on livestreams where the only commentary was applause, the odd volleyball-to-the-face sound effect, and intermittent "ev-ry-body clap yo hands" PA prompts, I can only describe to you how the Cubans were different. The easiest way to do this would be to say that they played like a pair of dudes playing volleyball on a beach, as opposed to like a couple of beach volleyball players. Even if they were not quite as dark a horse as their ranking suggested—they are Olympic-grade athletes, and Gonzalez, in particular, has a bouncy and long-limbed physicality that instantly identifies him as either a volleyball player or NBA small forward—they played a game that was altogether funkier and more casual than the one being played by their ostensible peers.

Give or take Gonzalez's rocket serves, the two won seemingly because of their refusal to play the same strutting as their opponents. Diaz is a total unflappable genius, but the soul of that genius is understatement. He placidly doinked winners into little patches of vacant beach, stuck out his foot to save balls he couldn't reach with his hand, and cooly slipped shots around opponents whose Skying For An Epic Stuff routine suddenly looked very silly in comparison. In a sport that's a lot more doctrinaire than anything on a beach should ever be, Diaz and Gonzalez were offbeat, improvisatory and unhurried; they were authentically different, in short, and that approach worked a lot better for a lot longer than anyone had a right to expect.

To behold a dark horse in the Olympics is always a treat, if only because the world is generally very good at sniffing out its world-class athletes, and because sports media is good at making sure we know everything about them; most of what we're sold as underdogs are simply true-blue purebreds we haven't met yet. But while their relative geopolitical misfortune had a lot to do with Diaz and Gonzalez's anonymity going into the games, their performance in Rio delivered a surprise that was different in a sweet and meaningful way from the others that Rio has given us thus far. If you can't win—and sooner or later, in Rio and everywhere else, all the money and power behind favored athletes generally has its way—you can at least make it weird, in the ways in which you yourself are weird. You can play your game within everyone else's rules, and win for doing that. In that sense, the Cubans still haven't lost.