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…
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