'Swedish Jump-Set' helps world's top beach volleyball team reach the medal round at Paris Olympics

PARIS (AP) — A pair of 22-year-old Swedes has risen to the top of the beach volleyball world with an innovative technique that could prove to be as revolutionary as the forward pass in football or high jumping’s Fosbury Flop.

The “Swedish Jump-Set,” as it has become known, is a move in which the player jumps as if to spike the ball but instead sets it to his partner. The misdirection forces the opponent to leave his feet, so that he is out of position when the ball is actually passed.

“We call it the modern style of beach volleyball,” Australia’s Mark Nicolaidis said after losing to the Swedish team of David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig in the preliminary stage at the Paris Olympics. “Every sport gets to a point where what’s been working for the last five, 10, 20 years doesn’t work anymore. There have to be some people that innovate the game.

“Some of the work they’ve been doing was a big risk when they first came on the tour,” Nicolaidis said. “They’ve crafted a really good game style and it’s been working consistently for the past few years.”

Volleyball, and its beach offshoot, are three-touch games where for decades the usual sequence has been bump-set-spike: One player receives the ball and passes it forward to a setter, who then lofts it above the net to set up his partner for the kill.

All teams occasionally hit the ball over the net on the second shot — whether as an element of surprise or because their partner, having dived for a ball, is out of position. But the Swedes are the first to rely on the jump-set as a first option.

“We know that if we’re going to win matches we have to go for it every ball,” Hellvig said. “And, it’s when we play normal 1-2-3 — that’s when we don’t perform as well. So we know that we just have to keep going for it, and have no doubts.”

Every sport evolves; fans of early basketball or American football wouldn’t recognize the games as they are played today. Beach volleyball itself has seen some innovation — for example, the bump set giving way to the overhead set, or the jump serve being replaced by long, floating offerings.

“Beach volleyball is still a young sport,” said Jonas Reckermann, a German who won the Olympic gold medal in 2012 and is in Paris providing TV commentary. “This is another stage. Something like this, where there is a new team and they have a totally different style from out of nowhere, I don’t recognize that this happened before.”

The Swedes didn’t invent the jump-set; a Polish team of Piotr Kantor and Bartosz Losiak, who went to the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, is often credited as the pioneers as part of an offense that featured misdirection and speed.

But the Swedes didn’t work the jump-set into their routine as an add-on: Their coach, Rasmus Jonsson, convinced them to start using it when they were barely teens. And they've done it well enough to win four events on the international tour in 2023 and rise to No. 1 in the world rankings.

In Paris, they earned a spot in the semifinals, needing one more win for a medal.

“I don’t think anyone is shocked anymore. Everyone has seen us doing it," Hellvig said. “But the main idea is that it’s hard to defend against, no matter whether you know about it. We are not worried that people will figure it out.”

The Swedes' success is convincing other teams to give the jump-set a try, but it's not just a matter of just deciding to do it. Both Swedes are versatile and speedy enough to make it work; a successful jump-set also requires a good first pass, so it is not an option on every play.

“Sometimes the reception is too bad, too off the net," Ahman said. “So we have to play old-school style.”

But, sooner or later, most players expect the jump-set to take over the game.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of teams do it in maybe five, 10 years,” American Miles Partain said. “Sweden are great at it. We do it too. It is definitely much harder (to defend) when you can execute it.”

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AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games