U.S. women’s volleyball team takes fourth at world championship

The U.S. women’s volleyball team finished fourth at the world championship, one year after winning the program’s first Olympic title in Tokyo.

The Americans were swept by Italy 25-20, 25-15, 27-25 in Saturday’s bronze-medal match. The U.S. lost its previous contest to Serbia in the semifinals.

The world championship in volleyball is quadrennial, like the Olympics, making it the single biggest tournament between the Tokyo and Paris Games. The U.S. men lost in the quarterfinals of their quadrennial worlds last month.

The U.S. women’s roster at worlds lacked three-time Olympian stalwarts from Tokyo — Jordan Larson, who said before the Tokyo Games that she would retire from the national team afterward, and Foluke Akinradewo Gundersen, who came back from November 2019 childbirth to make the Olympic team at age 33.

Instead, this team, again coached by Olympic beach and indoor champion Karch Kiraly, was led on the attack by Ali Frantti, a 26-year-old in her global championship debut, with Tokyo Olympians Annie Drews and Jordyn Poulter leading the team in scoring and setting going into the bronze-medal match.

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Jennifer Valente, who in Tokyo became the first U.S. woman to win Olympic track cycling gold, added a world title in the same event, the omnium, on Friday.

“I achieved the Olympic dream before this one, but this really had been on the forefront of my mind for a long time,” she said, according to USA Cycling.

Valente, 27, prevailed at the world championships in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France, one day after taking bronze in a separate elimination race, which is not on the Olympic program.

The omnium, which debuted at the Olympics in 2012, is an event consisting of four races that