The Year Ahead: Sun, sand and volleyball in the European summer
Editorial
The 2022 European summer will be like a dream for beach volleyball fans. Between June and September, there will be plenty of action going on in the sport in four different nations with the EuroBeachVolley and three Age Group European Championships taking place in the continent.
The highlight of the season will, of course, be the 2022 EuroBeachVolley, which will be the 30th edition of the continent’s flagship competition. The three-decade anniversary of the event will be properly celebrated with its inclusion in the second edition of the European Championships that will take place in Munich, Germany.
A multi-sport event with nine different disciplines and as many as 4,400 athletes, the 2022 European Championships will be held at the Munich Olympic Park and will celebrate he 50th anniversary of the 1972 Summer Games in the German city. Beach volleyball will be played in seven consecutive days, from August 15-21, at the iconic Königsplatz.
The biggest stars of the sport are expected to compete in the event, including reigning Olympic champions and four-time EuroBeachVolley winners Anders Mol and Christian Sørum of Norway. The Beach Volley Vikings became the first players to win the events four times in a row last year in Vienna and could now become the first ones to hold five continental titles, surpassing Germans Jonas Reckermann and Laura Ludwig.
On the women’s side, it will be Switzerland trying to make history. The country took home the last two editions of the tournament, with Tokyo Olympic bronze medalists Joana Heidrich and Anouk Vergé-Dépré triumphing in 2020 and Nina Betschart and Tanja Hüberli topping the podium in 2021, and will now try to become just the second country to win three in a row, repeating what Germany achieved between 2015 and 2017.
Earlier in the summer, it will be time to see the new jewels of European beach volleyball in action. The U22 European Championships will be the first to take place, having the Netherlands as the hosts from June 7-12. The tournament has traditionally been a great platform for young, up-and-coming players from the region and had, in the last decade, as many as three Olympic champions (Norway’s Mol and Sørum and Germany’s Kira Walkenhorst) and ten Olympians crowned as champions.
Russia has been a powerhouse as of recently, winning all five of the most recent women’s editions and three out of the last five among the men. They will have a strong candidate to keep their run going in the female tournament in multi-champion Mariia Bocharova, who has won the tournament with different partners in 2019 and 2021, while Swedish rising stars and defending champions David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig are the frontrunners on the men’s side.
About a month later, from July 14-17, competition will head to the Turkish city of Izmir, the host of the U20 European Championship. Some of the event’s most successful champions in the last decade include Mol, Betschart, German Clemens Wickler, a silver medalist at the 2019 World Championship, and Dutchman Yorick de Groot, who took silver at last year’s EuroBeachVolley.
Russia has also been the country to beat in this age group, with four victories among the women and two among the men in the last five year. Defending champion Elizaveta Gubina will try to keep at the top among the women while France seems well-positioned to collect their first-ever gold with the duo of Teo Rotar and Arthur Canet, which won the U19 World Championship last month.
The closing event of the season will be the U18 European Championships, set to take place in Loutraki, Greece, from September 1-4. Germans Wickler and Julius Thole, Russians Oleg Stoyanovskiy and Nadezda Makroguzova and Latvian Tina Graudina are a few Olympians who won their first continental titles in this age group.
There’s been significant balance in the age group, with four different countries winning the last four editions of the tournament in both genders – and Russia, Germany and Ukraine appearing on both lists.