Spain’s Paula Soria, one of the stars in Thursday’s qualifiers in Goa
The seventh Challenge event on the 2023 Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour is coming to Goa this week, from October 19 through 22, and it will be the first major world-level tournament held in India.
· Watch the Beach Pro Tour Goa Challenge qualifiers live on the Beach Volleyball World channel.
· Watch the Beach Pro Tour Goa Challenge main draw live on VBTV.
Overall, it will be the fourth time India is hosting a world-level beach volleyball event. Back in 2008 and 2010, Chennai welcomed a couple of FIVB Challengers, and in 2019, the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour had a 1-star stop in Visakhapatnam, but a tournament with so many top-calibre stars as the one starting in Goa is taking place in the southern Asian country for the first time in history. The battles in Goa will unfold at the Zuri White Sands Resorts in the sands of Varca Beach in India’s smallest state.
The 2023 Goa Challenge will get underway on Thursday morning at 08:30 local time (03:00 UTC). The first competition day will offer the qualification battles in two knockout rounds with eight available main draw vacancies per gender at stake.
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With 22 teams joining the women’s qualifiers, 10 have already been granted a spot in the second round and are just one win away from the main draw. Bracket leaders Liliana Fernаndez & Paula Soria (pictured in the main photo) of Spain are one of them and are already awaiting their opponents, who will emerge from the tournament opener between Czechia’s Kristyna Adamcikova & Karin Zolnercikova and Latvia’s Liva Ebere & Deniela Konstantinova.
Two of the second-round deciders have already been lined up with both opponents and they will start at 09:20 local time (03:50 UTC). In one of them, Austria’s Franziska Friedl & Katharina Schutzenhofer will take on USA’s Kimberly Hildreth & Teegan Van Gunst, and in the other, Spain’s Belen Carro & Angela Lobato will lock horns with Lithuania’s Ieva Vasiliauskaite & Erika Kliokmanaite.
Five of the 27 teams in the men’s qualifiers have earned their byes to start directly from the second round and they are Germany’s Lukas Pfretzschner & Sven Winter, China’s Wang Yanwei & Li Jie, Austria’s Robin Seidl & Moritz Pristauz, Australia’s Izac Carracher & Mark Nicolaidis and Switzerland’s Adrian Heidrich & Leo Dillier.
The remaining 11 participants in the second…
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