LONDON — There are surely people out there who think that beach volleyball deserves to be taken as seriously as more conventional Olympic sports like basketball and swimming, but few of those people appear to be here just now.


“I think the women are wearing too much in the top area, actually,” said Brent Lewingon, 24, a carpenter who, wrapped in a damp Australian flag after what he described as two sleepless days of nonstop partying, was providing his own commentary at the Germany-Australia preliminary-round match Sunday.


It was a provocative thing to say; only about eight square inches of Lycra stand between the women and nakedness. But a peculiar aspect of the whole enterprise is that in Britain, where people love to talk about women and their lack of clothing, it appears to be perfectly acceptable to discuss this point.


“As I write these words there are seminaked women playing beach volleyball in the middle of the Horse Guards Parade,” Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, wrote Monday in The Daily Telegraph, listing the things he likes about the Olympics. Johnson, who is married, then described the women as “glistening like wet otters,” but that is a separate issue.


Beach volleyball, in which pairs of athletes in beach attire compete on courts made from sand, sometimes in places that usually do not have sand, like the middle of this gritty, gray, rainy city, became an official Olympic sport in 1996. It clearly requires supreme athletic skill and dedication.


But with its odd features — female competitors in mirrored sunglasses who embrace each other virtually every time they win a point, providing a thrill for spectators who like that sort of thing; loudspeakers psyching up the crowds with songs like “We Will Rock You”; and the seemingly random interpolation of cheerleaders who emerge periodically for sudden bouts of dirty dancing and conga-line-forming, only to go away again — it has had a hard time proving itself against more established events.


“We like the athleticism,” said Alex Doughty, 26, who was wearing a garbage bag Sunday in a futile attempt to remain dry amid a downpour that marred the day’s efforts at a Southern California vibe. Carrying a cup of beer in each hand and one more in each jacket pocket, he was on his third alcohol run of the afternoon.


“We like the fact that they’re wearing small bikinis,” said his friend Alistair Blake, who had supplemented his garbage bag with a plastic shopping bag fashioned into a hat.


“No, we’re trying to sound better than that,” Doughty said, bringing up athleticism again.


The International Volleyball Federation this year lifted its rule mandating that female competitors wear bikinis, allowing them to wear shorts and sleeved tops, but worries that they would completely adopt more modest attire have been unfounded.


Meanwhile, ever alert to fresh opportunities to illustrate news articles with photographs of women’s behinds, the British tabloids have found in beach volleyball perhaps their Platonic ideal of an Olympic sport. “Cheeky Girls on Parade!” was the headline in The Daily Mirror, while The People used a number of angles for its own cheeky photographs.


The Sun, meanwhile, has a “beach volleyball correspondent,” Ally Ross, although Ross’s job did not get off to a promising start the other day when he eagerly switched on his television.


“And what do I find at 2:25 p.m., the appointed time? MEN’S Beach Volleyball,” he wrote. “It’s like drinking nonalcoholic lager.”


To their eternal credit, the players, who are as relaxed and friendly as swimming champions can seem at times chilly and distant, appear unfazed when the questions turn inevitably to their bikinis.


“It’s always something everyone talks about, but for us it’s like other people’s office clothes,” Laura Ludwig of Germany said in an interview after her team defeated Australia in three sets. “We take it as an advantage in that it brings people into the stadium. It’s not really an issue for us.”


The Australian players said that neither the bad weather nor the weird fake beach scenes in cold urban locations bothered them.


“To people who aren’t used to it, it’s a little strange,” said Louise Bawden of Australia, referring to the oddity of a beach popping up in central London, in view of the Foreign office, where this nation’s international policy was being formulated. “But many of our events are held in synthetic beaches, like the side of the highway in Moscow or a barge in Norway.”


As these competitors left the stadium, the crowd waited for the next match (the matches went on all day). Among the spectators, it turned out, was Susan McCaw, 50, a former United States ambassador to Austria, who was here from Santa Barbara, Calif., with her beach-volleyball-crazed 12-year-old daughter. There were also several hundred British soldiers, many recently returned from duty in the dangerous Helmand Province of Afghanistan, who were now on volleyball duty.


“When we got here we had to drive the players — the girls — back and forth,” said Mark Hanlon, a rifleman. “Also the cheerleaders. It was cracking.”


Oddly enough, a fair number of spectators said that when it came right down to it, they wished they were somewhere else.


“We won a prize to come here,” said Kulwinder Gill, an accountant from Leicestershire, who did not look like a man who was enjoying a prize. “We were very disappointed.”


Alex Cook, 29, also an accountant, said, “To be honest, we just wanted to come to anything.”


“I apparently filled out a survey that I don’t remember filling out,” said Chloe Boyall, 20, a college student. “Then I got an e-mail saying I had tickets.”


“I don’t cover this normally,” said a reporter for Sports Illustrated, scurrying into the stadium.