The Hamburg Elite is a regular stop on the Beach Pro Tour and will take place for the fifth consecutive year. The German city has also hosted other major beach volleyball competitions, such as the 2019 FIVB World Championships, the 2017 and 2018 FIVB World Tour Finals, the 2016 Hamburg Major on the World Tour, and the 2008 CEV European Championships.
21-year-old Jacob Holting Nilsson and 20-year-old Elmer Andersson, runners-up of the Adelaide 2025 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championship last medaled on the Beach Pro Tour together in early May, when they topped the Brasilia Elite podium. They also took silver at the Saquarema Elite in April and are now targeting their third piece of hardware for the season as they lead the men’s main draw bracket in Hamburg. The young Swedes will enter the competition on Thursday in a Pool A match against a team arising from Wednesday’s qualifications.
Later on in the pool, Holting Nilsson & Andersson will take on Poland’s Michal Bryl & Bartosz Losiak, who won the Hamburg tournament in 2022 and finished runners-up at last year’s edition, as well as Norway’s Hendrik Mol & Mathias Berntsen.
Another Norwegian duo – Tokyo 2020 Olympic champions and Paris 2024 Olympic bronze medalists Anders Mol & Christian Sorum – are returning to Beach Pro Tour action after a three-month absence. It will be only their third Tour appearance this season, after they triumphed with gold in Saquarema and finished fifth in Brasilia. The Beachvolley Vikings have a long track record of success in Hamburg. Not only did they make the podium at each of the last three Elite-level tournaments in the German city, earning gold in both 2024 and 2025, but they also won the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour Finals in Hamburg back in 2018, and an FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championship bronze in 2019. Mol & Sorum are seeded third in the upcoming competition and will play in Pool C, in the company of France’s Joadel Genevieve Gardoque & Elouan Chouikh-Barbez and the German pairing of Paris 2024 silver medalist Nils Ehlers with Lui Wust.
Another home pair – Paul Henning & Lukas Pfretzschner – who won the Alanya Challenge at their most recent Tour appearance some two months ago, were given the fourth seed in the men’s main draw. The German duo will lead Pool D and will take on mighty opponents, such as last week’s Rio de Janeiro Elite winners Martins Plavins & Kristians Fokerots of Latvia, who finished fourth in Hamburg last year, and USA’s Chaim Schalk & James Shaw, who are back together after some recent appearances on the Tour with different partners.
Hamburg bronze medalists in 2024 and 2025 Stefan Boermans & Yorick de Groot will both compete in 2026, starting from Pool B. However, this time they will play on opposite sides of the net. Boermans and his current partner Alexander Brouwer, a Hamburg silver medalist in 2016 and in 2022, arrive in Germany as winners of the Elite event in Gstaad last month and are seeded second in the bracket. De Groot, on the other hand, now plays alongside Steven van de Velde. The already strong lineup in that pool is boosted by the presence of the world’s new number two team – Evandro Oliveira & Arthur Mariano Lanci of Brazil. Evandro is also among the past Hamburg medal winners, having picked up silver at the 2017 World Tour Finals.
