Major honours
The golden era of Dutch men's volleyball was brief but unmistakable. After losing the 1992 Barcelona Olympic final to Brazil and settling for silver, the team, under coach Joop Alberda, largely kept the same roster together for four more years and finally won gold at Atlanta in 1996. Their final opponent was Italy, then riding a streak of two straight World Championships, and the match ended 17-15 in the fifth set, still considered one of the tightest Olympic finals in the sport's history. Bas van de Goor was named tournament MVP, alongside Ron Zwerver and setter Peter Blange. The following year, in 1997, the Dutch capped their peak by winning the European Championship on home soil. A failure to develop the next generation afterward pushed the men's team out of Olympic contention, and the women's team partially filled the gap with a fourth-place finish at the 2016 Rio Olympics. The country's total of two Olympic medals in indoor volleyball is small, but one of them is gold.
Record comparison
Bars are scaled to the strongest team in this list.
Club legends
Rivalry
One team is enough: Italy, in the 1996 Atlanta final. Velasco's Italy was the strongest team in the world at the time, and the Netherlands took from them the one thing they could never win for themselves — Olympic gold.