About two months ago, Katja Stam and Raisa Schoon had, as they say, about a 5 per cent shot at making it to Tokyo 2020. Then they went on a good run and eventually snatched a last-minute ticket to the Games through Europe’s Continental Cup to make their Olympic debut at an early age.
Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 - Beach Volleyball
Schoon & Stam leave Tokyo with mixed feelings
Also still feeling a little guilty for knocking Walsh out of fifth Olympic participation
Published 08:15, 02 Aug 2021
At Tokyo, the young Dutch pair started off with two defeats, to reigning world champions Sarah Pavan and Melissa Humana-Paredes and to the experienced Swiss pair of Anouk Verge-Depre and Joana Heidrich. They then achieved their first Olympic victory, a clean slate over top-level Germans Julia Sude and Karla Borger. It meant they got a second shot at the round of 16 through the lucky-loser matches. They failed to take advantage of that opportunity, losing in straight sets to Cuban duo, Lidy Echeverria and Leila Martinez.
Stam in a one-on-one duel with Borger
As a result, 19-year-old Raisa and 22-year-old Katja, the youngest and the third youngest players of the tournament, left Shiokaze Park with mixed feelings.
“It’s really disappointing. I think we didn’t play a good game,” 1.92m-tall Katja Stam told Volleyball World after their last match at Tokyo 2020. “We were actually growing into the tournament, and in every match we played better. We also had trainings in between all the games and we improved in those every day as well. Hence we expected that this game would again be better than the previous one, but we didn’t play our own game. We played more against ourselves than against our opponents. That’s really disappointing right now...
“I think tomorrow morning I will still be disappointed, but maybe a day later it will be better. It was really unexpected that we are actually here. So that’s a good thing. But we also expected that we would play at a better level ourselves and put a little bit more pressure on the opponents than we actually did. That’s disappointing for now and I don’t know how we will look at it later. In the end, I am very proud that we made it to this tournament, but the level that we showed in this tournament is not what we wanted, which makes me ambitious to do better.
“We wanted to give everything we had. If it's good enough, we move forward, and if not, then we have new chances at the next tournament to improve. It was just all or nothing, accepting if we lost, but really fighting for the win.”
Schoon in a one-on-one duel with Sude
Stam and Schoon have a lot of talent and a lot of potential, which they were not able to reveal on the Olympic sand in full, but their journey to the Games was a remarkable one and is sure to stay in their memories forever.
“It was really insane, because we had been playing together for one and a half years,” Katja continued. “If the Olympics had been last year, we wouldn’t have had a chance, because we weren't even playing internationally together. At the beginning of the year we went international and I think we had like a 5 per cent chance of going to the Olympics.
“We needed to get a fifth place at a 4-star World Tour event and we did that at the last one (Ostrava in late May), playing against Agatha and Duda. If we hadn’t won that match we wouldn’t have been able go to the Olympics. So then our chances went up to like 20%.
“Then we still needed to win the Continental Cup to get that last ticket. It was a crazy tournament, a crazy week... It was in Holland and it was really cool because we could play for everybody, all friends and family. And when we won that tournament we were still at 50%.
“Because we needed to beat the other Dutch team on the day after to get to the Olympics. I had never been so nervous for a game. We both were so nervous, but we still played very well and we made it. So that was an insane journey. In three weeks our chances went from 5% to 100%!”
Katja Stam
In that last deciding match, Stam and Schoon had to go against none other than two-time Olympian Marleen Van Iersel and her current partner Pleun Ypma.
“Van Iersel said to us, ‘Good luck and have fun! You deserve it’. It was nice,” said Raisa Schoon.
That’s not the only advice the talented young defender received from a former Olympian. Her mom, Debora Kadijk, represented the Netherlands in beach volleyball at two Olympic Games, Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000.
“In 2018, I played at the Youth Olympic Games and my mother was also there as my coach,” Raisa said. “She told me the Olympic Games are the same as the Youth Olympic Games, only 10 times bigger. And that’s the only thing we talked about it. She just told me, ‘Enjoy it and be yourself, and then everything s going to be alright.’
“When I was leaving for the Olympics, my parents, who have six beach volleyball courts back at home in Werkendam, organized a little good-bye for me and they hoisted the Olympic flag high up. It’s still waving...”
Raisa Schoon
Stam and Schoon will also remain in beach volleyball history as the little known Dutch hopefuls who put an end to legendary Kerri Walsh Jennings’ aspirations to qualify for her fifth Olympics and pursue her fourth Olympic title. In Ostrava, Walsh and Brooke Sweat needed to do better than their compatriots Kelly Claes and Sarah Sponcil to book one of the American spots at Tokyo 2020, but fell an early victim to Stam and Schoon in the qualifiers.
“I actually felt a little bit guilty after the match, because I always looked up to her,” Raisa said. “She was in a way my hero when I was younger. But when we played on the court against her, I said to myself, ‘We need the fifth place and we’ll go at full 100 per cent! And, yes, we did it!”
“I wasn’t really aware of what the consequences actually were from winning that game,” Katja added. “And then everybody was talking about it and I was like, ‘oh, we did that?’”
Although they had to spend some of their time in Tokyo in quarantine, prompting some mixed feelings about their first Olympic experience, Katja and Raisa point to the positives of their experience in Japan.
“It was really cool, especially in the beginning, when we could walk freely to the Village,” said Katja Stam. “It was really inspirational to be around all these athletes from all around the world and from different sports. It was an inspiration to see how every country and every athlete works differently on their own things. That was really cool. The last days, when we were in quarantine as close contacts, were a little different, but still we enjoyed our time here.”
Schoon and Stam take the positives out of their Olympic experience
