WOVD President Van Meenen praises China's sitting volleybal

"The sitting volleyball for the disabled in China has unlimited future," said Pierre Van Meenen, president of the World Organization of Volleyball for the Disabled (WOVD) here on Monday.

The 7th Games for the Disabled, a major event in China's sports calendar, officially opened in Kunming, the capital of southwest Yunnan Province, Saturday night, with featuring 2,251 athletes of 24 ethnic nationalities in 15 sports from 35 delegations.

Van Meenen, a long-term president of the European Organization of Volleyball for the Disabled, acknowledged that he only started to know China's sitting volleyball after he took over the WOVD presidency in 2005.

"So wonderful!" said Van Meenen in the sitting volleyball field at the Yunnan Normal University. "So many participants, so good fields, so crowded audience, so qualified judges, so enthusiastic volunteers...." Van Meenen described with so many "so" in one breathe numbering his fingers.

Sitting volleyball was first introduced to the Paralympic competition agenda in 1980, and the women's sitting volleyball only made its Paralympic debut in 2004.

According to WOVD, the first sports club of the kind for the disabled was established in the Netherlands only as late as 1953.

Athletics and sitzball, originating from Germany, were the main sports. Soon it was found that sitzball, which is played by athletes sitting on the floor, was too passive, and more mobile forms of sports were looked for.

In 1956, the Dutch Sports Committee introduced a new game called sitting volleyball, a combination of sitzball and volleyball.

Since then, sitting volleyball has grown into one of the biggest sports practiced in competition not only by the disabled in the Netherlands, but also by interested "able-bodied" volleyball players with injuries of the ankle or knee.

Van Meenen said, among the more than 50 members of WOVD, China's development in sitting volleyball is remarkable, though China still has a long way to catch up with the world's best.

China only hosted its first sitting volleyball international competition in the sixth Far East and South Pacific Games for the Disabled in 1994, with its first women's team set up in 2002. Up till now, China has 20 men's and women's teams in combined. When the women's sitting volleyball made its Paralympic debut in Athens, China won the gold medal, the first team title for the Chinese disabled.

"It is not so important to predict who will win the gold medal in the Beijing Paralympics in 2008, however, if I have to say, China's women sitting volleyball team has the potential to win the gold medal, while the men's team is difficult to win medals," said Van Meenen.

"There is smile on everyone's face," he said, "And from what I have seen in Kunming here, I believe the Beijing Paralympics must be most successful."