Teams from 28 countries to compete on Sun Island
Qatari Ahmed Tijan in action at the Paris Elite16 last week
Qatar’s Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan will be the top-seeded men’s team at the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour Maldives Challenge from October 13 to 16. Elize Maia and Thamela Coradello of Brazil, on the other hand, lead the women’s entry list for the seventh Challenge event of the Tour’s inaugural season. It will be the first time in history the island nation in the Indian Ocean hosts a major world-level beach volleyball competition.
The finalised entry list for the USD 150,000 tournament on Sun Island includes 86 pairs from 28 different countries. In each gender, 16 teams were seeded directly into the 24-team main draw line-up. A qualification tournament will fill the remaining eight vacancies per gender.
· Watch all matches at the Beach Pro Tour Challenge event in the Maldives live on Volleyball TV.
Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan, who topped the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Ranking for about nine months, from August 2021 until May 2022, and are currently ranked seventh, will lead the men’s main draw seeding. The Qatari pair, who claimed bronze at last year’s Olympic Games in Tokyo, will be looking for their first medal at the Challenge level, after already collecting a Rosarito gold and a Jurmala silver in the top Elite16 category.
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Reigning European champions David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig come next down the men’s entry list for the Maldives. The 20-year-old Swedes picked up their first Challenge gold on the Beach Pro Tour when they topped the podium in Kusadasi back in May. They return to the Beach Pro Tour after their triumph at the 2022 CEV EuroBeachVolley tournament in August, when they won a first medal for their country at the competition, ahead of Czech Olympians Ondrej Perusic and David Schweiner and world champions Anders Mol and Christian Sorum.
Switzerland’s Marco Krattiger and Florian Breer, who earned bronze at the Agadir Challenge in July, are in position three on the entry list for Sun Island. Their compatriots Quentin Metral and Yves Haussener, who won the Futures events in Madrid and Rhodes earlier this year, were also seeded directly into the main draw.
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Other teams to look out for include Myslowice and Budapest Futures winners Patrikas Stankevicius and Audrius Knasas of Lithuania, Songkhla Futures gold medallists and…
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