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.