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Beach Volleyball News
The tournament held at the Spiaggia Molo di Adriano comes right after last week’s Futures event in Giardini Naxos and will be followed by another one in Cirò Marina from July 14-17. Back in May, Italy also hosted a Futures event in Cervia, bringing the total of tournaments staged in the country to four.
The event in Lecce will feature teams from 28 different nations, 18 of which from Europe. Hosts Italy have the most entries at nine, followed by England and Lithuania with three, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland and Greece with two and Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Turkey and Ukraine with one each.
The non-European contingent set to compete in Lecce features teams from Canada (five), Argentina (three), Australia (three), New Zealand (three), Japan (two), the United States (two), Chile (one), Cameroon (one), Qatar (one) and Vanuatu (one).
Four of the six teams that stepped at the podium last week in Giardini Naxos – Belgium’s Sarah Cools/Lisa Van Den Vonder and Italy’s Valentina Cali/Margherita Tega (silver and bronze in the women’s tournament) and New Zealand’s Bradley Fuller/Sam O’Dea and Italy’s Jakob Windisch/Gianluca Dal Corso (gold and bronze among the men) – remain in Italy for another week and will compete in Lecce.
The event will also feature two duos that collected medals in a Futures event in Ios, Greece, which also took place last week - Czechs Vaclav Bercik and Matyas Dzavoronok, the winners of the men’s tournament, and Lithuanians Ieva Dumbauskaite and Gerda Grudzinskaite, who took bronze among the women.
The tournament will also have the presence of three players who competed at last year’s Tokyo Olympics in Italian Marta Menegatti (partnered with Valentina Gottardi), Japanese Megumi Murakami (playing alongside Sakurako Fujii) and Argentinean Julian Azaad (joining forces with Maciel Bueno).
The event starts on Thursday with a 16-team qualifier in each gender, from where four men’s and women’s duos will advance to the main draw, which begins on Friday. The medal matches will be held on Sunday.