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It’s quite literally like walking into the land of the giants.

The Canadian National Exhibition grounds on the shore of Lake Ontario in downtown Toronto are playing host to a massive celebration of one sport over the next five days.

Let’s just call it Volleyworld.

The Canadian Open Volleyball Championship brings together club teams from all over the country and pits them against each other under one enormous roof.  

There are 54 courts and about 9,000 athletes buzzing from dawn until well past dusk. These are the future stars of one of the world’s most well loved indoor games – the 13-to-17-year-olds who aspire to one day stride across Olympic fields of play.

Volleyball is an extremely vocal sport, so the constant shouting, urging and cheering combines to make a carnival-like atmosphere. It’s a multi-ring circus under the huge tent, with dozens of balls rifling through the air at any one time.

Next door at the Ricoh Coliseum, the headliners of Volleyworld are warming up in preparation for World League play. This is the top-flight international league to which the Canadian men’s national team has just gained entry for the first time since 2007.  

There’s plenty of anticipation on the part of the Canadians, in spite of the fact they are coming off a tournament in Long Beach, Calif., that saw them narrowly miss qualifying for London 2012. They lost in the final to the defending Olympic champions from the United States.

“It was like a balloon being popped,” says 6-foot-10 Canadian attacker Gavin Schmitt of Saskatoon. “It was that sick feeling in your stomach that there’s no other chance. But that’s the nature of international sport.”

And so the Canadians go on to the challenge of the World League and playing in a group which includes Finland and Olympic-bound teams from Poland as well as world No. 1-ranked Brazil.  

It’s a gargantuan task for the Canadians, who are ranked 18th globally. But this is a team that features youth and potential, something they showed in Long Beach by defeating highly touted Cuba and Puerto Rico.

“For sure the loss in the final was disappointing,” says Canadian head coach Glenn Hoag. “But we’ll use this as a starting point for the Olympic road to Rio in 2016.  We’re going to find out how this team plays under pressure.”

And there will be a hefty amount of pressure.

Serves are delivered at about 120 km per hour, and there’s plenty of movement on the ball. Add in the full arm swing of a spike and the speeds increase. A defender might be trying to dig out a bullet travelling at 140 km per hour.

Paul Duerden, a former member of the national team and once a top-ranked pro playing in Europe, is doing the TV analysis for this stop on the World League circuit. He points out a 36-year-ancient Brazilian player by the name of Ricardo who is dancing around the court in his team’s practice session.  

“He’s the one that looks kind of dumpy,” Duerden says with a smile. “Playing against him I despised that. This dumpy looking guy whose absolutely killing you!”

Indeed, Ricardo, who is making his return to the Brazilian side after a five-year absence, is the best setter (playmaker) on the face of the earth. An Olympic champion who has won all there is to win in this sport, Ricardo sees everything and deftly puts the ball wherever he desires so that his huge-hitting teammates find themselves in the perfect position to make surgical kills.

All of these players are leaping well above the eight-foot-high net. They’re blocking shots that are 12 and more feet aloft. It’s a game played in the ether and also on the ground. These enormous men are aggressive and intimidating, but they are also amazingly agile.

Schmitt, himself a tree, casts a glance at the opponents he’ll face this season in World League action and chuckles.

“We need the experience of playing these guys,” he reckons. “It does us no excellent to keep playing teams we know we can beat. We need to be pushed.”

There’s no doubting that.   

The Canadian men have taken a huge step, and now enter that land of the giants, desperately hoping to find their place in Volleyworld.

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Intraday stock chart for Facebook on the Nasdaq. (CBC)

Facebook went public this morning in New York City, after CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg rang the bell to open trading on his $104-billion US company.

The world’s largest social network raised at least $16 billion in selling 421 million shares at $38 apiece on Thursday. But Friday morning when markets opened was average investors’ first chance to own a piece of the website that boasts more than 900 million members.

After a lengthy delay, when shares started changing hands at about 11:30 a.m. Facebook shares were going for $43 — $5 or more than 10 per cent above the IPO price. The shares then slid lower, and within 10 minutes of opening, were down to $40, a five per cent gain from the IPO price.

Some 80 million of the company’s 421 million shares traded hands in the first 30 seconds of trading.

The most hotly anticipated initial public offering of recent memory, the stock is trading under the symbol FB.

From the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, Zuckerberg remotely rang the bell to open the stock exchange in New York early Friday, but Facebook shares themselves didn’t start trading until 11:30 a.m. ET.

The shares were supposed to trade hands at 11 a.m. ET but a trading delay at Nasdaq place the huge moment behind by 30 minutes.

Stock demand reaches fever pitch

Many investors are keen to get their hands on the stock, but it’s questionable whether the company can live up to its hype.

Data released this week suggested the ratio with which Facebook users click on the ads they see on the site is significantly lower than the ratio other web companies see. Online ad company Wordstream estimates Facebook’s click ratio is 0.051 per cent, whereas at Google, it’s as high as 0.4 per cent.

This week, the world’s largest car company, GM, announced it would stop spending the $10 million it currently spends on Facebook ads, preferring to use those funds elsewhere — a concerning development for a company on the verge of an IPO.

Still, Facebook has already fared better than many of its online rivals in that it already makes money. The company earned $205 million in the January to March quarter, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In 2011, Facebook pocketed $1 billion in profit.