There’s a digital clock in the gym of the USA Volleyball facility in Torrance, California, tracking down the years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds to the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. It serves as a reminder to every athlete who steps in for a workout, a perpetual countdown to exactly what they’re working for and it’s ever-approaching deadline.
But there could have been another clock, this one counting up, totaling the two years, 11 months and nine days since an American men’s team won a gold medal at a major event on the then-FIVB and now Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour, when Jake Gibb and Taylor Crabb did so at the Chetumal four-star in November of 2019.
That clock, alas, can be reset.
On Tuesday evening in the Volleyball World Dubai Challenger, 20-year-old wunderkind Miles Partain and Andy Benesh continued their blitz through their second straight Challenger event, sweeping Brazil’s Pedro Salgado and Arthur Mariano in the semifinals before a second sweep over Ukraine’s Sergiy Popov and Eduard Reznik, 21-15, 21-17, claiming a long-awaited — and direly-needed — gold medal for the American men.
“Our women’s program has been dominating so consistently and us, the men, have been lagging, so we’re trying to find our way back on the map and make our federation and country proud to be the beach volleyball hub of the world,” said Benesh, the 27-year-old blocker who has now won two medals this season on the Beach Pro Tour.
“We believe in ourselves. We always have that hope. We talk about it a lot; we’ve been good at not expecting anything. We just take it moment by moment. We want to get to a certain level but that’s going to come over time. It’s cool we’ve been able to do it so quickly. We didn’t have low expectations, we had no expectations, and we just tried to match the intensity of the moment.”
No moment, it appears, is too intense, too big, too anything, for Partain, the 6-foot-2 defender who was playing in just the second international event of his promising career. He made six semifinals in eight events on the AVP with Paul Lotman this year, won his first event in Atlanta, and very nearly did so again at the Phoenix Gold Series Championships.
In two international tournaments, which includes this Dubai Challenger and last week’s Challenger in the Maldives, he and Benesh have amassed a staggering record of…
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