LESS THAN 100 DAYS TO GO! (guest piece from Tamsin Barnett)

It was a solid tournament for us with some great wins against Canada, Norway, China and Mexico.

After a loss to the taller Chinese team of Xue-Zhang Xi (ranked #3), we came back with a win against China's Tian Jia and Wang (ranked #2). It was an intense game but so much fun with some wicked defense from Nat and some monster blocks from me. It was our second game on center court against a Chinese team with a home crowd so it was very noisy but very cool too. We managed to have some token Aussies in the crowd who had traveled from Shanghai city to watch, so in between 3,000 voices shouting "CHINA...CHINA..." we could here 3 passionate voices shouting "go Aussies!"

Day 3 of competition we showed up at the courts again and took down the Mexicans with a 2:0 win. This progressed us through to a play-off for a semi-final birth against the number 1 seeds from Brazil, Juliana and Larissa.

We had one hour between our matches so we made the most of the time to recover and prepare for the big match-up to take us through to the semis. We had a great start with a 4:0 lead but after that the Brazilians switched on and played a very solid game with very few errors. We worked hard to put pressure on them with our defense but unfortunately it was not enough and we lost 2:0.

But all in all it has been a great tournament for us and 5th place means we have improved on our Olympic ranking- great news! I love being at these events and it is so inspirational to see the best men and women in the world play.

For now it is back to Australia for a week of training before heading to Seoul Korea for the next FIVB World Tour event. Nat and I won the event last year so it's time to defend our title!

TAMSIN XO

PS ­ The torch hit Hong Kong this week, to a “gold medal” welcome, as they described in the paper (after a month of turbulence). How cool is it that the torch is going up Mount Everest. We are on our very own summit climb, and this week in China we made some huge gains up the mountain with our play. It was a great opportunity to be in China, to play China (twice) in front of their home crowd…it was educational to notice that when China were doing well they were a very vocal bunch, but at the first sign of their struggle the crowd abandoned them. I hope they keep that up :)

Yours on the sand,