It was announced today that Elaine Youngs and Nicole Branagh have clinched the number 2 spot for the U.S. Olympic Beach Volleyball Team.

Now, I really don’t have anything against these two. Branagh has been a spitfire all season. EY has been EY; fearless, fierce and simply the hardest working woman in all of Pro-Beach Volleyball. They’ve earned it. The combustion between these two is enough for a hundred beach weenie roasts.

EY has maintained her bad girl image often talking smack about other players. Also they have done a great job of ratcheting up a more visible fan base. Baby blue “I ‘heart’ BY” shirts adorn every tourney I have been to this year.

I was just hoping that this would be the year that things really got all shaken up in the brackets. I was really hoping for a Jen Boss/April Ross or Rachel Wacholder/ Tyra Turner to slip in and give us real fans a little more to chomp on. With the regular absence of the top four teams in the domestic AVP tour, us real fans have had few too many morsels to chew on this Olympic Enhanced season. We needed a real underdog, like in swimming. However, do we now have something better?

What we have now is a real big American Rivalry going into China. A team united by their country but divided by what has happened in between lines drawn in the sand.

Elaine Young Nicole Branagh Misy May Kerri Walsh

We have the All-American Good Girls vs. the All-American Bad Grrrls. On one hand, we have the fun, baseball (and baseball player) loving Misty May-Treanor. It’s always fun to watch this guy’s girl whether she is dancing with the Cuervo Girls or just other teammates. Her partner, Kerri Walsh, is the uber-accessible 6 foot blonde with a 1000 kilowatt smile who will never turn down a moment with the fans. At this year’s Hermosa Open she held court on the beach. EY and Nicole Branagh are quite the opposite. Publicity-shy, a little brooding and laser beam focused on the current task at hand. They have no problem yelling at refs, kicking the sand and talking trash. EY and Nicole have flat-out rejected the "pin-up" aspect of the sport. Kerri and Misty have found a middle ground. They represent a different kind of America; they are rough, less polished and prefer Durango to Hermosa.

You would think this duo has more tats but, oddly enough, they don’t.

This year’s Olympics will certainly be a clash of the best of the two Americas.

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