Cheng-Hughes reunite former partnership, beginning partnership shuffle for Paris Olympic Games

And so the Olympic partnership shuffle begins. For months, we’ve been asked on SANDCAST when the partnerships for the Paris Olympic Games would begin to solidify. And for months, the players have been, for obvious reasons, keeping quiet on the matter, finishing out their respective seasons with the partners they tested out this season, to see if an Olympic medal — not just qualifying, but a medal — could be in their future.

The first major domino has fallen, as Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes announced to NBC that they are partnering for a run at the Paris Olympic Games in 2024.

The move, made public on Tuesday morning, has come as a surprise to many. Cheng and Betsi Flint were the most successful American team on the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour this season, with a gold medal at the Hamburg Elite16 and a pair of fourths in Rosarito and Paris. Hughes and Kelley Kolinske, meanwhile, won gold at the Itapema Challenger and cemented their names onto the Manhattan Beach Pier with a victory over Cheng and Flint in the finals.

But were either giving themselves the best shot at winning an Olympic gold medal with their previous partners, or were they very good teams with chances at qualifying but still underdogs when it came to getting on the podium? Both, it appears, felt the latter.

“We want a gold medal in Paris,” Cheng told NBC. “So we’re kind of working backwards [from that]. In that regard, in our training, what are our strengths and our weaknesses? How can we kind of bring other things? How can we do that repeatedly well? Because I think the top teams in the world are consistent.”

Consistency was something lacked by all American teams both domestic and international in 2022. On the AVP, there wasn’t a repeat winner until Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth won in Chicago, the final event of the AVP’s regular season. Internationally, only Cheng and Flint won a medal in an Elite16. Hughes and Kolinske made the medal rounds twice, in Itapema and Jurmala, Latvia. No American team made the semifinals of the World Championships, where the podium featured Brazil, Canada, and Germany.

Some of this, of course, was to be expected: Of the top six American teams — Flint and Cheng, Hughes and Kolinske, Nuss and Kloth, Sarah Sponcil and Terese Cannon, Emily Stockman and Megan Kraft, Corinne Quiggle and Sarah Schermerhorn — only Nuss and Kloth had…