Beach World Championships begin Friday in Mexico with huge Olympic implications
The first matches on the 2022 Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour took place at the Plaza de la Constitucion in Tlaxcala, Mexico/Vollyball World photo
The 2023 Beach World Championships begin on Friday in Mexico, in a sprawling, three-city, 10-day festival of beach volleyball that will spread pool play between bull ring arenas and outside of town halls in Tlaxcala, Apizaco, and Humantla. After pool play, all matches will be held in Tlaxcala, site of last year’s rollicking Challenge event that hosted tens of thousands of fans and packed every court.
The implications are huge for the USA contingent.
Fourth place has often been described by beach volleyball players as the most tantalizing and haunting finish in the game. Two shots at a medal, neither taken. And fourth has been the exact finish for an American men’s team for three of the previous four Beach World Championships.
It’s a run that began with Theo Brunner and Nick Lucena in 2015 at The Hague. They dropped in the semifinals to the eventual champs, Bruno and Alison of Brazil, then again in the bronze-medal match to Evandro and Pedro, also of Brazil.
In 2019, Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb, after a narrow escape in the quarterfinals to Brazil’s George and Andre, requiring a comeback from down 11-14 in the third set, failed to beat Russia’s Oleg Stoyanovskiy and Viacheslav Krasilnikov in the semifinals or Norway’s Anders Mol and Christian Sorum for bronze (both matches went three).
Three years later, Brunner was back in the semifinals again, this time with Chaim Schalk. Again, he was stumped twice by a Brazilian pair, first Renato Lima and Vitor Felipe, then George Wanderley and Andre Loyola.
Each of those five individuals have described those fourth-place finishes, one win from one of the most important podiums in the sport, as some of the more haunting of their respective careers.
Oh, the things they would do for another fourth in the next 10 days in Mexico.
There is no single event with bigger Olympic implications than this.
The winner earns an automatic berth into the 2024 Paris Olympic Games for their respective federation. Those who do not win but make, say, the semifinals, will collect points bigger than if they had won an Elite16, making significant bounds up the Olympic standings. Which makes this weekend and the next a critical 10 days for everyone, and, critically, the American men. The video below explains in further detail.
The format of the Beach World Championships
There are 48 teams, broken into 12 pools of four, which will be played in a round-robin style format, in which every team will play one another. The top two teams break pool and advance to the round of 32, as will the top four third-place teams. The bottom eight third-place teams, as determined by point differential, will compete in a lucky-loser round on Tuesday, October 10. The winners of those rounds will then be into the round of 32.
Why Bourne-Schalk, Brunner-Crabb need a big finish
Currently, only Miles Partain and Andy Benesh are inside the top-17 in the Olympic rankings, which is the cutoff to qualify for the Olympics via points. Tri Bourne and Chaim Schalk are No. 18 and Theo Brunner and Trevor Crabb No. 21, though those numbers don’t paint a complete picture, as Brunner and Crabb actually have a higher point per event average than Bourne and Schalk.
The pressure is higher for Bourne and Schalk than it is for their American rivals, as two poor finishes in a row — both first-round qualifier losses in Montreal and Paris — have caused their entry points to plummet, to No. 59 in the world. One more early exit could see them drop into qualifiers for Challenge events. Their task is a tall one, in a pool featuring Paris Elite16 silver medalists Clemens Wickler and Nils Ehlers of Germany, Poland’s Piotr Kantor and Jakub Zdybek, and Chile’s Noe Aravena and Vicente Droguett, who are having a down year but are dangerous nonetheless.
Brunner and Crabb should have little trouble breaking pool. While their top team, George and Andre, and No. 3, Ukraine’s Sergiy Popov and Eduard Reznik, are both strong, the bottom is Gambia, an athletic but raw pair — I played them in Doha in 2021 — who will make some spectacular plays but will be unlikely to sustain a winning effort.
The worst-case scenario for Brunner and Crabb will be a third-place finish and a lucky loser match on Tuesday, whereas it is a very real possibility that Bourne and Schalk could finish last in pool just as easily as they could finish first.
Link to the standings and pools of the Beach World Championships
Tri Bourne passes a ball at the Uberlandia Elite 16 while Chaim Schalk prepares to set/Volleyball World photo
Betsi Flint, Julia Scoles with a huge opportunity
The USA women’s race has essentially boiled down to three teams: Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth (No. 3 in the Olympic rankings), Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes (No. 4), and Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles (No. 11). If fate shines down upon Alix Klineman and Hailey Harward, playing in their second event as a team this weekend, then a fourth could somewhat realistically be put into the mix, though even then it would be a long shot, and both acknowledge as much. Anything shy of a fifth-place finish from Klineman and Harward, after a first-round qualifier exit in Paris last weekend will essentially dash any Olympic hopes.
For Flint and Scoles, however, the race is still very much on. The gap between them and the top two teams is significant, more than an Elite16 gold medal’s worth of points behind Cheng and Hughes. They’ve proven more than capable of winning at the highest level, hauling in a silver medal at the Montreal Elite16, where they beat world No. 1 Duda and Ana Patricia in the process, and winning the AVP Manhattan Beach Open.
This is one of the few scenarios in the world where winning gold at the World Championships doesn’t necessarily cement your spot in the Paris Olympics. Should Flint and Scoles win gold, they’d simply win a berth for the USA, a berth it already effectively owns, given how high the top two teams are ranked. They’d still need to finish higher than one of the other two pairs in the Olympic rankings by June 9, 2024. But a win would earn Flint and Scoles a gargantuan haul of points, 1,600 in total, or 400 more than a gold at an Elite16.
Terese Cannon and Megan Kraft are the fifth USA team competing, though after both split with their previous partners — Cannon with Sarah Sponcil, who is now playing indoor; Kraft with Emily Stockman, who is now retired — they are not making a secondary run at the Paris Olympic Games.
Where can I watch the Beach World Championships?
All matches will be streamed live, with replays available, at Volleyball World TV. I’ll be commentating nine of the 10 days, including the semifinals and medal rounds. See you there. Use “VOLLEYBALLMAG” for a discount.
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