Australia

Poland arrived at the 2012 London Olympics ranked third in the world and left having lost to Australia in straight sets — a result that still defines the era of captain Aidan Zingel more than anything the Volleyroos managed afterwards, since the win did not carry them past the preliminary round; they finished ninth all the same.

The team dates to 1963, when the Australian Volleyball Federation, now Volleyball Australia, first organised the sport nationally. It has never settled on one home ground, moving between venues such as the State Volleyball Centre in Melbourne and Netball Central in Sydney depending on where a tie falls.

Its only continental title arrived in Jakarta in 2007, a 3–0 defeat of China in the final of the Asian Men's Volleyball Championship that made Australia the first Oceanic nation to win the event and earned a place at that year's FIVB World Cup. Hosting the Olympics in 2000 brought a better placing than any away campaign since: eighth, after a run to the quarter-finals.

In the FIVB Volleyball Men's Nations League the ceiling has been thirteenth, reached in both 2018 and 2019; two years of sixteenth place, in 2021 and 2022, dropped the team out of the competition. Travis Passier, a 6'10" middle blocker, played through both the 2012 Olympics and the 2014 World Championship, where Australia's furthest advance anywhere — the second round, for fourteenth place — came in 2018.

A podium finish at a World Championship, or a route back into the Nations League's top tier, is still not part of the record.