TLAXCALA, MEXICO — She heard a voice. Clear as day. As if it had come from a person sitting directly next to her.
“Breakthrough is here.”
That’s what Kelly Cheng heard two years ago, after making it into the semifinals of the Sochi four-star with Sarah Sponcil. The voice wasn’t wrong. Quite prescient, in fact. The next day, Cheng and Sponcil won a gold medal, their first as a team, a finish that would all but punch their ticket to the Tokyo Olympic Games.
Two years later, there it was again. Not a voice this time, but something, a feeling, a sensation, something inexplicable but it was there. She knew it, knew it was the same.
“Last time I had a breakthrough moment like this I heard it,” Cheng said. “This time I felt it, felt this sense of peace.”
She first felt it two weeks ago, in Paris. Yet the breakthrough didn’t happen. The opposite, in fact, happened: Cheng and Hughes fell in the quarterfinals for the second straight tournament, “and that’s OK,” Cheng said, “because I think — we can’t see how God intends things to be, so we just talked about staying on the path. We know we’re on the right path and here we are.”
She said this smiling, chilled by a champagne shower, wrapped in an American flag sarong. She said this next to Hughes, irreversible smiles on their faces.
She said this as the winner of the 2023 Beach Volleyball World Championships.
It’s a title that came as hard-earned as any, a 21-16, 24-22 victory over Brazilians Ana Patricia and Duda, a team that had been so indomitable it hadn’t even dropped a set in seven matches in Mexico, a team that hadn’t lost in 19 matches.
It came with drama and theatrics. It came with Cheng’s best blocking performance, six in all, capping a tournament in which she entered the gold-medal match averaging 1.9 blocks per match. It nearly came earlier, too, at 22-21 in the second set. Ana Patricia swung a deep angle swing. A perfect swing.
A swing that was out.
Cheng celebrated. Hughes had never heard her scream like that. A World Championship scream. Then she glanced at the line judge, her flag pointed down, signaling the ball was in. The up ref agreed. Cheng and Hughes challenged. And so the world waited, with bated breath and heart rates reaching dangerously high levels. Thirty seconds later, a 30 seconds that lasted an hour, the replay…
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