The International Volleyball Federation revealed the match schedule for the beach volleyball tournament at the Rio 2016 Olympics, to which Egypt, Tunisia and Qatar have qualified.
The tournament will bring together 24 female and 24 male pairs to compete from Aug. 6 to Aug. 8 on the sands of the Copacabana beach, home of Brazilian beach volleyball.
The pairs were divided into six groups of four teams per gender, such that in the preliminary rounds, every team competes once with each of the remaining three teams in the group.
In the men’s tournament, Tunisia was drawn into Pool C with the United States, Italy and Mexico, while Qatar was chosen to compete in Pool F against another American duo, Spain and Austria.
The Qatari power-duo Jefferson Santos Pereira and Cherif Younnouse will face USA’s Gibb-Patterson on the first day of the tournament. It will then play versus Spain’s Herrera-Gavira on Aug. 8 and Austria’s Huber-Seidl on Aug. 10. On the other hand, Tunisia’s Mohamed Arafet Naceur and Choaib Belhaj Salah are scheduled to compete against America's Lucena-Dalhausser, Italy’s Nicolai-Lupo and Mexico’s Virgen-Ontiveros on Aug. 7, 9 and 11, respectively.
As the only Arab team to qualify to the women’s Olympic beach volleyball tournament, Egypt's Doaa El-Ghobashy and Nada Meawad will hit the Rio sands on the same dates as Pereira-Younnouse. The pair was drawn into Pool D, along with Germany's Ludwig-Walkenhorst, Italy's Menegatti-Orsi Toth and Canada's Broder-Valjas.
In those preliminary matches, the match winner is awarded two points, the loser gets one point and the forfeiting duo gets none, according to NBC Olympics . After each team plays its three matches, the teams in every pool will be ranked based on its total number of points. In case of a tie, it will be settled according to the result of a head-to-head match.
The next round will be a single-elimination stage consisting of 16 teams, where the loser in every match gets eliminated. The round will include the top two teams in each pool (12 total), the two best third-ranked teams in the competition, plus the two winners of the "Lucky Loser" matches between the remaining four third-place teams.
Qatar’s beach volleyball team recently qualified to Rio 2016, after winning the Asian Volleyball Confederation’s Continental Cup. This will mark the nation’s volleyball Olympic debut. Meanwhile, the Tunisian men’s team and the Egyptian women’s team booked their 2016 Olympic berths by winning the CAVB Continental Cup earlier this year.
Additionally, Egypt is headed for the men’s Rio 2016 volleyball tournament as the winner of the African Qualifiers. It was pooled with Argentina, Cuba, Iran, Poland and Russia.
The Rio 2016 games will mark Qatar, Tunisia and Egypt's debut at Olympic beach volleyball, which has only been an official Olympic sport since 1996.