American Jake Gibb is set to become the oldest Olympic volleyball player in history.
Gibb, 45, and Taylor Crabb, 29, qualified for the Tokyo Games in beach volleyball on Friday after fellow Americans Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena were eliminated in pool play of the last Olympic qualifying tournament in Ostrava, Czech Republic.
Dalhausser and Lucena, both 41 and also older than any previous Olympic indoor or beach volleyball player, grabbed the second and final U.S. men’s Olympic spot on Saturday after Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb lost in the round of 16 in the Ostrava tournament.
Bourne and Crabb needed to win the event to supplant Dalhausser and Lucena.
The U.S. Olympic beach volleyball team is complete after April Ross and Alix Klineman and Kelly Claes and Sarah Sponcil previously qualified.
LIST: U.S. Olympic team roster across all sports
Dalhausser and Todd Rogers were the last U.S. men’s team to earn an Olympic medal, gold at the 2008 Beijing Games.
The U.S. men are not medal favorites in Tokyo. The world’s top teams are Anders Mol and Christian Sørum of Norway, Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Oleg Stoyanovskiy of Russia, Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan of Qatar and two pairs from Brazil.
Gibb smashes the old-age record in beach volleyball, which debuted at the Olympics in 1996. Angolan Emanuel Fernandes previously held it, competing at 41 in 2008, according to Olympedia.org.
The oldest indoor player in Olympic history was also 41.
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