Volleyball and basketball are rightly fashionable to be considered the most dynamic of the team sports. The set of points is rapid, the combinations are lightning fast, the reaction, the speed of thought - everything is at the highest level. In conditions where every action counts, every fraction of a second, the additional advantage of your site is not an extra factor of success. Let's see who this factor helped to achieve the desired dominance in the world sports arena.
In basketball, the most significant are the Olympics and World Championships. In the male part of the named tournaments, the American professionals from Dream Team are absolutely superior. But if the main games of the four-year period have witnessed the victory of the USA national team twice (1984 - Los Angeles, 1996 - Atlanta), then out of the 5 titles of the strongest male team on the planet, not a single one has been won. The national teams of Argentina, Brazil and Yugoslavia were the best at home world championships, which once organized a holiday for their fans.
Women from the USA are also in a dispute over the leadership in the amount of triumphs in the planetary championships with a solid advantage, but curiously, none of them were held at their home. Accordingly, they do not fall under our criteria. But the US women's basketball team fits very well into the story of the Olympics, where the girls joined their male compatriots on the top step of the podium. Let us recall that the "gold" of the American coinage was issued in Los Angeles and Atlanta at intervals of 12 years.
In volleyball, in addition to the above formats, there are tournaments within the World League for men and the World Grand Prix for women. Let's go in decreasing order according to the degree of importance of the event and see what happened at the Olympics and whether there were any home successes.
Men ended up being stingy with such feats. In volleyball history, only two entries from this category have survived. They belong to the national teams of the USSR in 1980 and the USA, which took gold medals at the next games in the same "city of angels".
However, the girls in terms of such achievements are still scarce. But it is gratifying to note that here, too, the Soviet volleyball players did not stand aside from the "golden holiday" at the Moscow Olympics: +1. But the second case was recorded not in the United States, but in Japan, and, moreover, even earlier than the country's anthem sounded in honor of the winners from the USSR - in 1964.
The same two teams appear in our encyclopedic section on the World Championships, only in the reverse order. Soviet volleyball players turned out to be the strongest in 1952, while Asian athletes celebrated victory 15 years later. Representatives of the USSR also distinguished themselves among men. In the same 1952, as well as a decade later, the volleyball players of our country won the main awards of the world championships, and the teams of Czechoslovakia and Poland won one more title of the strongest in their stands - in 1966 and 2014, respectively.
And finally, about the tournaments with a commercial flavor. The World Men's League has existed since 1991, and the first two rallies ended on the floor of the Italian team, which became the triumphant of the final fights. A year later, the Brazilians won at home, a year later, Italian volleyball players again rejoiced at a similar success, and in 1996 athletes from the Netherlands closed the series of home victories. So far, no one else has managed to win their Final Six.
As for the women's volleyball World Grand Prix, the phenomenon we studied had to wait until last year. For the first time, American girls celebrated the victory on the home court. In the final round, they won all 5 matches, losing only 2 sets to their rivals. The support of the stands thus helped the US team to become the winner of the World Grand Prix title for the 6th time.
