The Year Ahead: International beach volleyball set for revamp with Beach Pro Tour
Editorial
Seasons following the Olympics tend to be relatively slow ones in international beach volleyball. There aren’t typically any major events and players often take their feet off the gas a little bit as they start preparing their bodies and minds for another race for Olympic qualification. Expect 2022 to be nothing like this.
With the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics by one year, the ‘quad’ leading to Paris 2024 was reduced to just three seasons, meaning results and ranking points will be in high demand in a year in which the main concern of players from around the world would typically be gelling with a new partner.
The 2022 season will also bring a whole set of novelties for international beach volleyball as the FIVB World Tour, which was the top global competition of the sport since 1987, will be replaced by the recently-created Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour, which will combine beach volleyball with an entertainment platform that brings together music, food and the beach lifestyle.
The new event will feature events in three different levels. The Elite tournaments will have the highest ranked teams in the world and will present 16 duos in each gender. The Challenge events will provide access to the Elite tournaments and will feature a 24-team main draw in each gender and a qualifier with up to 32 tandems. The Futures level was designed to introduce younger players to the international game and events will have 16 teams in the main draw and a qualifier with up to 16 duos. At the end of the season, The Finals event will reunite the ten best-ranked teams.
Even though the Beach Pro Tour’s inaugural calendar is still being finalized, it’s already possible to say that Europe will have a prominent role in it as a total of five Elite events have already been confirmed for the continent in the summer besides the World Championship, which take place in Rome, Italy, in June.
The Czech industrial city of Ostrava will host international beach volleyball for the fourth-time with a tournament scheduled for May 26-29. From there, the top players in the world move to the Latvian coastal city of Jurmala, where they will play from June 2-6.
The picturesque Swiss Alps village will welcome the elite of the sport for the 21st time in 22 years with a tournament set to happen from July 7-10. The next month, the German city of Hamburg, which hosted the 2019 World Championship, will be the stage of an Elite event. The fifth European stop in the list that’s been released will take place in a French city to be confirmed in September.
European teams were in great form during the last international season, winning 94 of the 150 medals that were in play around the world. A total of 24 different European countries stepped on the podium at least once and with most of the starts of the continent set to continue their careers on the sand in 2022, there’s no reason for us to expect anything less than another extremely successful season for teams from the continent.