Four European pairs to watch at Tokyo 2020

Among the 11 European duos qualified for the women’s beach volleyball tournament at Tokyo 2020, there are 11 duos that are perfectly capable of leaving their memorable mark on the Olympic sand. Here are just four of them that are probably most likely to reach the podium at the Games and become only the second European duo to do so in the history of women’s beach volleyball.

Let’s start with the reigning European champions, Joana Heidrich & Anouk Verge-Depre of Switzerland. They got together after the previous Olympic cycle. They both took part at the Rio 2016 Games, but each with a different partner. Joana Heidrich & Nadine Zumkehr reached the quarterfinals and Anouk Verge-Depre & Isabelle Forrer stopped just short of that, finishing with a ninth place.

At their third World Tour event after teaming up, Heidrich & Verge-Depre reached their first medal, a Hague three-star silver in June 2017. In 2019, they topped the podium at the Moscow four-star tournament to claim their first World Tour gold. In 2020, they peaked on top of the standings at EuroBeachVolley in Jurmala.

At the very last qualifying event on the Road to Tokyo, the Ostrava four-star last month, the 29-year-old players reached the final and claimed silver, which helped them climb to number five in the current FIVB World Ranking as the highest placed European pair.

Then, there is the other Swiss pair, Tanja Huberli & Nina Betschart, the highest placed European team in the Olympic ranking. 28-year-old Huberli and 25-year-old Betschart are slightly younger than their compatriots, but have longer experience as a team. They partnered up for the start of the 2016 season and in July of that year claimed their first World Tour medal, a bronze from the top-level Klagenfurt Major event. That was a huge confidence booster ahead of the next Olympic cycle, which eventually led them to a Tokyo 2020 berth as the number seven team in the Olympic ranking, picking up a gold, a silver and another three bronze medals on the Tour, and a 2018 European Championship silver along the way.

They claimed their most recent medal in late May of this year when they earned silver as Sochi four-star runners-up.

The Spanish tandem of Liliana Fernаndez & Elsa Baquerizo are the European pair that will go to Tokyo with the most Olympic experience as a team. They played together at two Olympics, finishing ninth at both London 2012 and Rio 2016. In fact, their first international appearance as a duo dates back to the U21 World Championship in 2007, where they reached the last four, and they have been together ever since. The 34-year-old Spanish athletes have now collected five silver and two bronze medals on the World Tour, as well as two bronze medals and a silver from the European Championships.

Surprisingly, both women’s teams who managed to book their Tokyo tickets early, at the 2019 FIVB Olympic qualification tournament in Haiyang, were European. One of them was the pairing of Liliana & Elsa. This has allowed them to focus all of their long-term preparations on the Games, so they should be in top shape when the battles on the Japanese sand get underway.

Even more surprisingly, the other team that won an Olympic berth in Haiyang were Latvia’s Anastasija Kravcenoka & Tina Graudina. At 24 and 23, respectively, they are the third youngest European pair to compete at the Games, but have already compiled some solid experience and shown some impressive results hinting that they could be the pleasant surprise on the Tokyo sand this summer.

Anastasija & Tina played their first international tournament together, a U18 European Championship, eight years ago, when they were only 16 and 15 years old. Three years later, they won gold at the 2016 U22 European Championship, and another three years later, they triumphed as continental champions at the women’s level, at EuroBeachVolley 2019 in Moscow. Soon after that the Latvians won the Olympic qualification tournament in Haiyang – surprising, because at the time they had reached the quarterfinals of a World Tour event only once before in their career.

So, similar to Liliana & Elsa, Kravcenoka & Graudina have had the luxury to gear their training towards Tokyo and, to show they are on the right path, they reached their first World Tour final four at the Sochi four-star in May, and their second – this week at the Gstaad four-star, where they were the highest placed European duo.