Fears of another Commonwealth Games-style embarrassment as world champs left ‘high and dry’

Australia risks the embarrassment of having to hand back or be stripped of another global sporting event following Victoria’s Commonwealth Games cancellation because the federal government is withholding funding from next year’s beach volleyball world championships.

The tournament, due to be staged in the Asia-Pacific for the first time at Adelaide’s Memorial Drive tennis centre, has been spruiked as part of the Australian Olympic Committee’s so-called “green and gold runway” of events leading up to the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games.

Mariafe Artacho del Solar will compete in a third Olympics in Paris but likely won’t get a chance at a world title on home soil next year.Credit: Getty

But having won a highly competitive international bidding race, the sport’s national peak body, Volleyball Australia, is facing the ignominy of a home world championship being scrapped after the federal government declined to match the $6 million the South Australian Labor government has thrown behind it.

Volleyball Australia chief executive Andrew Dee said volleyball officials had been “encouraged at every step of the way to keep going through the process” to secure funding before being told via a phone call on budget day last month there would be no money for it.

“We’ve done everything that was asked of us and to be left high and dry is not only frustrating because we’ve done so much work for this and won this thing in a contest against the rest of the world. But it would be hellishly embarrassing if we had to give it up or it was withdrawn,” he said.

Dee said he was hopeful the Albanese government would change its mind about “one of the hottest commercial properties in the world of sports events”.

“This is one of the top five biggest sports in the world. It might not be huge in Australia, but it’s a global sport,” he said.

“[The government is] so fixated on domestic sports, which everyone loves, and I love my footy too. But cricket, netball, rugby, they just don’t rate in the same size and scale as volleyball internationally and those truly global sports.”

The beach volleyball tournament for the Paris Olympics, which starts next month, will be held at a temporary 13,000-seat arena beneath the Eiffel Tower.

An artist’s impression of the Eiffel Tower Stadium, which will host beach volleyball at the Paris Games.

The world championships in Australia in November 2025 is the next global event in the sport after that and was originally going to take place in Geelong just before the 2026 Commonwealth Games. But the Victorian government’s sensational decision last year to pull out of the Games and pay a $380 million compensation bill also left the beach volleyball titles without a host.

South Australia stepped in, embracing the sport’s image of gender equality and the potential of a $20 million to $30 million economic windfall, and the competition has also received commercial backing.

Gina Rinehart’s mining company, Hancock Prospecting, is a major sponsor of Volleyball Australia, but it focuses its funding on high performance and athletes rather than events.

Dee said that without federal funding or corporate partnerships to plug the gap, Volleyball Australia would not be able to afford to run the world championships.

“The international body [Federation Internationale de Volleyball] is already acutely aware of that,” he said. “They ask us all the time, off the back of the Commonwealth Games cancellation, they said ‘are you going to be OK with this event in Australia?’ They’ve been asking us at every opportunity.”

Gina Rinehart, photographed with Artacho del Solar (right) and Olympian Nikki Laird in 2014, is a long-time supporter of volleyball.Credit: Owen Hammond

Amid uncertainty and frustration among cash-strapped sports about their financial futures, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is expected to make a significant Olympic funding announcement before the Paris Games.

But it is not expected to include the beach volleyball world titles.

“Volleyball Australia did put in a submission in the most recent budget, and there was no funding announcement in the budget,” said Travis Haslam, the First Assistant Secretary of the Office for Sport, at a Senate estimates hearing on Thursday night.

“These are decisions of government, and unfortunately, not every event can be supported.”

It’s understood the government never made a commitment to volleyball about the world championships and has decided to focus on high performance, including a $250 million upgrade of the Australian Institute of Sport.

But as news emerged of Netball Australia receiving $6 million for the 2027 Netball World Cup in Sydney, South Australian Senator and opposition spokeswoman for sport Anne Ruston suggested the government had walked away from volleyball at the 11th hour.

“To the best of my knowledge, the first that we heard that the government was not going to be intending to fund this particular event was when the [sports] minister [Anika Wells] was overheard telling people at the LIV golf event in Adelaide [in April] that she was not providing funding,” Ruston said at Senate estimates.

“I have to say it would be a very sad indictment if we lost an event like this.”

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