Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 17, 2016 - The second finalist of the women’s volleyball tournament at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games will emerge from a semifinal clash between China and the Netherlands on Thursday evening at the Maracanazinho.
They already played each other in a Pool B game at Rio 2016 with the Dutch winning by 3-2 (25-23, 21-25, 18-25, 25-22, 15-13).
This will be the 26th time these two national teams meet in a major world-level competition. So far, China beat the Netherlands 18 times and the Dutch defeated the Asian giant seven times.
They met at two different Olympic Games before – Barcelona 1992 and Atlanta 1996. The Netherlands won the first of these encounters in five sets. In the second one, the Chinese shut out the Dutch.
The two squads had already played each other twice in 2016, both times in the FIVB Volleyball World Grand Prix. On June 24 in Hong Kong, China mastered a 3-0 (25-22, 25-23, 25-21) win, but at the finals in Bangkok, on July 7, the European team took revenge with a 3-2 (23-25, 25-14, 19-25, 25-20, 15-8) victory.
This is the sixth time China make it among the top four at an Olympic Games with gold medals from Los Angeles 1984 and from Athens 2004. At Rio 2016, they finished fourth in Pool B and in the quarterfinals they upset hosts and defending champions Brazil in an epic five-setter.
For the Dutch, this is the third Olympic participation and they have already improved on the sixth place from Barcelona 1992 and the fifth place from Atlanta 1996. They finished second in Pool B of the current tournament and then managed a four-set victory over Korea in the quarterfinals.
China’s Zhu Ting has tallied up 121 points already and is second only to Netherlands’ Lonneke Sloetjes with 123 points in the competition’s Best Scorers chart.
A Dutch player leads one more of the seven individual rankings. With an average of 0.76 kill blocks per set, Robin de Kruijf is number 1 in the Best Blockers chart.