It’s hard to explain to friends back home, deeply envious of my privilege to go to any Olympic event I choose, why sometimes I prefer to watch the events in my office on the closed-circuit Olympic broadcast rather than watch them from prime press seats in the stands. The answer in a word: rain!

When my pal Filip woke me early this morning to tell me not to worry, that he had already confirmed that the beach volleyball final would be played regardless, I sensed that I wasn’t hearing entirely good news. I pulled back the shades in my room, glanced out the window and made the kind of spur-of-the-moment decision the truly great journalist must always be prepared for. Misty and Kerri had no choice but to play in a downpour—“that’s another reason we wear bathing suits,” Misty May-Treanor told reporters—but I could opt to stay dry back at the Main Press Center.

Apart from the comfort of dry clothes, there are certain professional advantages to staying away as well. Even with a bus system that, in my long Olympic tenure, deserves the gold medal for both efficiency and courtesy, the rigors of traveling to and fro pretty much limit you two events a day. But sit in front of the tube, with its 39 Olympic channels and a grandmaster like Al on the clicker, and you can see virtually every play of every game of every sport. At one point, Al was going back and forth so fast that I thought our heavyweight wrestler had just spiked a winner on the beach through the Chinese pair.

The biggest bonus today was that a time when I would have been riding the bus back from the “beach”, I got to see the a real volleyball game instead. Now I am not so old that the appeal of beach volleyball is lost on me. With all due respect to our women's gold-medal duo, May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh, who are not only sensational athletes but among my all-time, favorite Olympians, beach volleyball would not rate NBC prime-time live if not for the dimensions of the uniform and the hardbodies that are uncovered by them. (That is equally true for the men’s game.) And while the downpour might render me a sodden mess, it certainly had the players’ bodies glistening—sweat to the nth degree. (I am told that the Chinese were at first appalled by such immodesty among its athletes, but, with two duos in the women’s final four, they have obvious adjusted to our dubious Western ways.)

I know it is heresy to say this, but absent the titillation (and the rock and roll that punctuates the game), the beach version is simply not as interesting a game as traditional indoor volleyball. The six-on-a-side game has longer, more spectacular rallies and more variety in both play and strategy. Frankly, I had kind of forgotten how compelling the old-fashioned volleyball can be. I suspect that’s because we journalists are parochial and U.S. teams haven’t been serious medal contenders since both the men and women took bronze in Barcelona back in 1992.

But in Beijing we have witnessed an American revival. The men’s team is undefeated and will play Russia in the semis tomorrow. And today the American women played almost the perfect game to reach the finals, sweeping a Cuban team that had shut them out three sets to none just 10 days ago. These women sweat too, but it is not a sideshow; the rivulets simply disappear into their uniforms rather than their bellybuttons. They also leap, dive and sprawl with precious little regard for their bodies, the floor being a bit less forgiving than the sand.

Chacun a son gout, but I’m going against the flow and casting my lot with our indoor volleyballers. Frankly, it was such a pleasure watching the American women’s combination of power and precision, grit and finesse that it was like a day at the beach.