Water polo at the 2000 Summer Olympics – Women's tournament
Olympic water polo event
The women's water polo tournament at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, was held from 16 to 23 September 2000, with six teams competing in the debut tournament. The games were held at the Ryde Aquatic Centre and the Sydney Olympic Aquatic Centre. It was the first time in history that women's water polo officially competed at the Summer Olympics.
The tournament's format saw the six teams compete in a round-robin with the top four teams qualifying through to the semi-finals while the fifth and sixth teams competed in the fifth place playoff. From there, the winners of the semis met in the gold medal match while the losers met in the bronze medal match.
At the end of the round-robin, Australia, the Netherlands, Russia and the United States finished in the top four. After the Australians and the Americans each won their semi-final, they met in the final which was played on 23 September 2000. With the match tied at 3–3, Yvette Higgins scored the winning goal with only 1.3 seconds left on the clock to give Australia the gold medal. Russia captured bronze, beating the Netherlands 4–3.
Background and qualification
The women's water polo tournament at the 2000 Summer Olympics was the first time the tournament was held at the Olympic Games.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Water polo at the 2000 Summer Olympics – Women's tournament” as olympic water polo event. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as olympic water polo event. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1222681. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Water polo at the 2000 Summer Olympics – Women's tournament” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.