Experienced Aliaksandr Dziadkou & Pavel Piatrushka triumphed at the Qidong Futures in China on Sunday. They not only won Belarus’s first ever match on the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour, they not only earned their country’s first-ever medal on the Tour, but they made it gold! Germany’s Charlie Peters & Colin Alexander Paszkiewicz and Greece’s Stavros Ntallas & Dimitrios Chatzinikolaou took the men’s silver and bronze, respectively. Chinese home teams – Jiang Kaiyue & Zhou Mingli, Kadeliye Halaiti & Qi Siyu and Zhuang Ming & Wang Jiaying, in that order – finished first, second and third to sweep the women’s podium.
At their third appearance on the Beach Pro Tour, 36-year-old Aliaksandr Dziadkou and 32-year-old Pavel Piatrushka cruised through the tournament in China victorious in all five of their matches. In their semifinal, the top-seeded Belarusians produced a 2-0 (21-16, 21-17) win over 11th-seeded Australians Solomon Bushby & Justin Schumann, and in the final, they mastered a 2-0 (21-18, 21-17) victory over third-seeded Germans Charlie Peters & Colin Alexander Paszkiewicz. Dziadkou & Piatrushka managed to collect two golds and a bronze from the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour, on which they competed together from 2019 to 2021.
Peters and 19-year-old teenager Paszkiewicz settled for silver, their first on the Beach Pro Tour, after the two bronze medals they picked up this season, at the Ios Futures in June and at the Lagihna Beach Futures just last week. In Qidong, the German duo reached the final undefeated. In their semifinal, they managed a 2-0 (21-16, 21-15) win over sixth-seeded Stavros Ntallas & Dimitrios Chatzinikolaou of Greece.
The Greek pair also collected their second (consecutive) Beach Pro Tour medal, and first outside Greece, after the Ios Futures, where they finished runners-up. In a nail-biting third-place playoff in Qidong, they squeezed out a 2-1 (23-21, 20-22, 18-16) victory over Bushby & Schumann to get the bronze.
