The Egyptian men’s national volleyball team flew to the Congo on 5 January to participate in the African qualifications for Rios’s 2016 Summer Olympics, which will end on 15 January.
As announced by the management staff and trainers and led by Italian manager Flavio Gulinelli, the list of 14 players who will participate in the these qualifications are: Abd-Allah Abd El-Salam, Hossam Youssef, Abd El-Halim Fahim, Mamdouh Abd El-Moneim, Abd El-Latif Othman, Ahmed Salah, Ahmed Kotb, Reda Hekal, Mohamed Al-Husseiny, Omar Naguib, Ahmed Said, Mohamed Moawad, Mohamed Reda, and Ahmed Youssef.
The team rose to prominence when they participated in the 8th World Festival of Youths and Students held in Helsinki in 1962 and won first place.
They were one of few Arab teams to participate in the FIVB Volleyball World League, acquiring 13th place three times in 2006, 2007 and 2008 and ranking 14th in 2010 and 21st in 2015. Egypt has participated six times since 2006 in this league.
Recently, the team has won Slovakia and Montenegro, which qualified it to the second tier of the 2016 FIVB Volleyball World League. The other two Arab countries to participate in the FIVB Volleyball World League were Tunisia and Qatar. Tunisia began in 2013 and has participated three times. Qatar’s first participation was 2015.
In the FIVB Volleyball World Cup, the team ranked 11th in 1977, 8th in 1985, 11th in 1995, 12th in 2003, 10th in 2007, 12th in 2011, and 10th in 2015. As for the World Grand Champions Cup, they came in fifth in 2005 and sixth in 2009.
The team has won the gold medal at the Mediterranean Games held in 2005 and has ranked 11th in the 2000 Summer Olympics.
Tunisia is considered Egypt’s main competitor among African and Arab teams. At the All-Africa games, Egypt won the gold medal five times in 1965, 1973, 1995, 2003, and 2007 as well as the African Championship’s gold medal eight times in 1976, 1983, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2015. The team won against Tunisia in the 2015 African Championship in Cairo. This victory allowed it to participate in the 2015 FIVB Volleyball World Cup held last September in Japan.
In the Arab Games, the team has won the gold medal three times, the silver once, and the bronze once.
