How Football Inspired Olympic Beach Volleyball Gold Medalists

David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig realized a long time ago that they had no business being the No. 1 beach volleyball pair on the planet. 

The duo, now 22 years old, was abnormally young for the pinnacle of the game. And despite being over 6-feet tall, they considered themselves short for this sport full of giants. Also, they were from Sweden, which no one would ever mistake for the Copacabana beach.

All of which meant that Ahman and Hellvig had two choices: sink like they were trapped in quicksand, or innovate an entirely new way to play beach volleyball. 

In order to take over the game, they would first have to hack it.

“For us, it was the only way we could become as good as we are now,” Hellvig says. 

Even volleyball novices know how the game works. With each side allowed up to three touches before knocking the ball back over the net, they tend to go bump, set, spike. It’s been the basic pattern of the game for about a century, ever since players in the Philippines pioneered powerful smashes from close to the net. The early spike was known as the “Filipino Bomb.” 

Now the world’s best beach volleyball players have to contend with a different weapon: the Swedish Jump Set. 

Standard volleyball cadence calls for players to gently set the ball in the air on the second touch, teeing up their partner for a spike. But the Swedes thought this was a little too predictable. Why, Ahman and Hellvig wondered, should they let their opponents know who is going to hit the ball over the net and when? 

That’s when they changed the game by fundamentally rethinking its entire tempo.

Now, whenever possible, the player performing the set also leaps while getting ready to do it, instead of staying rooted to the ground. That forces the opposing blocker at the net to make a split-second decision. If he guards the guy preparing for the spike, then the would-be setter is already airborne and in position to spike it himself. If the blocker commits to guarding the setter, then the ball is simply passed to his teammate, who’s left wide open and undefended at the net. 

It’s beach volleyball’s answer to the run-pass-option in football, where a quarterback can make the decision to hand the ball off to a running back or keep the ball and throw it. It freezes opposing defenders, making them defend against multiple players who might have the ball instead of just one. 

“We really had to try to do something else,” Ahman said, “to be more dynamic and faster than the other teams.”

Ahman and Hellvig weren’t the first people to think of the Jump Set, or even do it on a world stage. But they turned what was an occasional trick shot into their primary strategy. 

Like any revolution, this one came with plenty of doubters. Opponents saw it as a gimmick that would eventually be solved.

“Almost every other team was like it’s never gonna work in the long run,” Hellvig says.

Except, the long run has now stretched into several years and the Swedes keep on winning. In 2022, Ahman and Hellvig became contenders on the Beach Pro Tour Challenge and the youngest ever European champions. The following season, they won the Beach Tour Pro Finals. All that was left for them was conquering the Olympics, where they reached the final after a win on Thursday. 

Instead of mocking it, top teams are now trying to mimic it. That’s not an easy proposition, though. Ahman says it fundamentally rewires a team’s reflexes—like going from a right-hand drive automatic car to a left-hand stick-shift. 

The Swedes’ advantage was that they’ve been running this scheme since high school. 

“You need quite a lot of practice before you can actually score points that way,” Ahman added.

Ahman and Hellvig, though, knew it was the only way they could reliably score points against teams older and bigger than them. “We are quite small,” Hellvig says, even though they’re 6-foot-3 and 6-foot-4. But he has a point—most of their opponents are galoots. Over the past five Olympics, every gold-medal winning team has featured a player 6-foot-7 or taller. 

What their strategy does is eliminate that height differential. When things go right, opponents are so bamboozled that they mistime their entire defense. And it happens enough that Åhman, Hellvig, and a tactic more shocking than building a midgame sandcastle now has them just two victories from gold. 

“If we fool the blocker,” Hellvig says, “we can hit against no blocker.” 

Original article published on the Wall Street Journal