The FIVB World Grand Prix has consolidated its status as the premier competition for women’s volleyball. Having had its inception in 1993, the competition is considered to be the women’s equivalent of the well known FIVB World League.
The governing body of world volleyball, the FIVB introduced the World Grand Prix in 1993 as a significant element in its strategy to enhance the popularity of the sport and assist in its development across the globe. It was intended to create a showpiece event for women’s volleyball by establishing an international annual competition. The format and sequence of the event was based on the World League, a successful men’s volleyball competition which was created three years earlier.
The Grand Prix contributed to a huge increase in the popularity of women’s volleyball in the East Asian region. Since the influence of Asian sponsors has been greatly beneficial to the Grand Prix, there have been some changes from the World League formula. The majority of the cities which feature preliminary round games are situated in Asia. On some continents, contesting teams must meet qualifying criteria to take part in the competition.
The Final Round of the 2011 World Grand Prix will be conducted in the Chinese special administrative region of Macau. The city also hosted the competition successfully 10 years earlier in 2001. After the completion of three rounds of pool based competition where 24 matches will be contested per week, the seven top placed teams as well as China will contest the grand finale of the competition in a round-robin format.
The past instances of the competition have been dominated by several successful teams. Since the 1990s women’s volleyball has seen the dominance of several successful teams; namely Brazil, Cuba, China, Russia and the United States.
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