U.S. stay on top of FIBA women's world ranking, China rises to seventh

GENEVA, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- Seven-time reigning Olympic champions the United States strengthened their grip on the top position of the FIBA women's world ranking, while Asian sides China and Japan both broke into top eight.

As the world ranking has been updated after the Tokyo Olympics, gold medal winners U.S. unsurprisingly kept their top spot.

Finishing sixth at the Tokyo Games, Spain has overtaken Australia into second place, as the latter only nailed one victory in the Olympic preliminary round before falling to the U.S. in the quarterfinals.

China climbed two spots to No. 7 due to their victories over two teams with higher rankings, Australia and Belgium, in the group stage en route to its best result of fifth-place finish at the Olympics since the 2008 Beijing Games.

Olympic hosts Japan, who had defeated higher-ranked France twice and edged Belgium in the quarterfinals, moved up two positions to No. 8.

Canada, France and Belgium kept their places at fourth, fifth and sixth respectively.

As the ranking system uses an eight-year competition window including two Olympic cycles, results from the London 2012 Olympics have dropped out while the Rio 2016 Olympics' results weightings went from 0.75 to 0.5.