Tri Bourne, Trevor Crabb to compete in a World Championship they thought was gone

Eighty percent of success in life is just showing up.

Woody Allen said that. Or the internet, at the very least, says so. It’s a cliché quote, one circulated often, and any evidence you’d need of its truth arrived on Wednesday afternoon, when Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb slipped off of the reserve list for this week’s World Championships in Rome, Italy.

How’d such a thing happen?

They showed up.

When they initially planned their extended road trip, one that began in Kusadasi, Turkey, on May 19 and included scheduled stops in the Czech Republic, Latvia, and Italy, they did so under the assumption they’d qualify for World Championships without needing an inordinately lucky break. But in Kusadasi, they reserved perhaps their worst performance as a team for the worst possible time, failing to break pool for the first time since the Gstaad Major in 2019, an event that also had dire implications for their Olympic aspirations. When the math was added up, Bourne and Crabb realized what had just happened in Kusadasi: They pushed out a 480-point finish and replaced it with one worth 300.

They were out of the World Championships.

Regardless of their performance the following week in Ostrava, where they qualified and took ninth after a pair of impressive wins over Australians Chris McHugh and Paul Burnett, and Estonia’s Mart Tiisaar and Kusti Nolvak, the losses in Turkey cast a shadow over their European trip. World Championships is the biggest event on the volleyball calendar – the biggest points, biggest money, biggest stage, biggest competition. Many consider a win at World Championships to be a far more notable accomplishment than an Olympic gold medal, for the field is double the size, as is the quota limiting each federation’s number of teams.

It is, simply put, the most difficult tournament to win, on the biggest stage the game has to offer.

And Bourne and Crabb wouldn’t have a shot at it.

Instead of attempting to improve upon their fourth-place finish at the 2019 World Championships, where their final losses were a pair of three-setters to eventual champs Oleg Stoyanovskiy and Viacheslav Krasilnikov, and Anders Mol and Christian Sorum, they’d be sitting on the sidelines. Chaim Schalk and Theo Brunner, and Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander would represent the United States in their place.

Until Wednesday, when they simply showed up to the preliminary inquiry, hoping that a team, any team, would withdraw.

Hours before the meeting, Sweden’s Jonathan Hellvig and David Ahman, who won their first gold medal in, of all places, Kusadasi, site of Bourne and Crabb’s demise, announced their withdrawal. Hellvig hurt his hand in practice earlier in the week. A replacement team was needed.

“We have looked forward to this event all year, so it really sucks that we can’t play,” they wrote on Instagram. “We will be back again soon.”

And until they are, Bourne and Crabb are back in the mix.

Their first match in Pool K will be Saturday, against Thailand’s Surin Jongklang and Banlue Nakprakhong, which will be followed by Colombia’s Johan Murray and Sneider Rivas, and then the most recent gold medallists and home crowd favourites, Samuele Cottafava and Paolo Nicolai of Italy.

“We’re always right where we belong,” Bourne said, and if there is a single player who would know that to be true, it’s Bourne.

His has been a winding road. After narrowly missing out on qualifying for the 2016 Olympic Games with John Hyden, Bourne was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that kept him out for the better part of two years. After a lengthy and trying recovery, he and Crabb were making a run at the Tokyo Olympics -- until Bourne broke his hand celebrating a win at the 2019 Vienna Major in a thrilling match against Austrians Phillipp Waller and Robin Seidl. So desperate were the two for points that they decided to play in that year’s World Tour Finals, in Rome, with Bourne using his left hand.

He’s been up and he’s been down, and Crabb has been alongside him during every high and low. This weekend, they returned to a high, being prepared for any break that could be thrown their way.

“I’ve been on the good and bad side of these situations many times now,” Bourne said. “Broken hand in Rome, sick for Vienna, COVID alternate in Tokyo. Unfortunately, this is being a professional athlete.

“Great opportunities are extremely hard to come by, so when one is taken away or given, it can be life changing. When things go against you, you face the problem head on and find a way to eventually use the adversity to your advantage. When things go your way, you remind yourself of the times when they didn’t and go to work.”