Xue overcoming obstacles at her third Olympics

Chinese beach volleyball star Chen Xue knew very well that competing at the Tokyo Olympics would be nothing like the experiences she had with longtime partner Zhang Xi at the Beijing 2008 Games, when they won bronze, and at the London 2012 Games, when they finished fourth.

Qualifying, for starters, would be considerably more difficult. At the age of 32, Xue hasn’t been competing a lot on the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour alongside partner Xinxin Wang. They focused on the Asian Continental Cup Finals instead, but as of their first match there, it seemed like the odds would be against them.

With teammates Shuhui Wen and Jingzhe Wang sustaining an injury on the first day of the event, the only option for Xue and Wang to qualify for Tokyo was for them to win six matches in Nakhon Pathom, Thailand.

They did exactly that, but things didn’t get any easier afterwards. When they returned home, the Chinese pair had to quarantine for two weeks in their houses, and were not able to practise under a month ahead of their participation in the Olympics.

“It’s been a tricky last month,” Xue reflected. “We couldn’t train on the court. We could only do some personal training in our rooms. Our ‘partner’ during that time was the wall, that's all we could do to try to keep our feeling for the ball. After completing quarantine, we only had a week before we had to leave for Tokyo. I remember when we first stepped on to the sand after that, we felt a little like fish out of water.”

Qualifying at the last possible opportunity and not being able to practise shortly before the Olympics seemed like a perfect recipe for failure. But that’s certainly not what we’re seeing from the Chinese duo in Tokyo.

Xue and Wang lost to second-seeded Americans April Ross and Alix Klineman in their first match, but bounced back to defeat experienced Dutch pair Sanne Keizer and Madelein Meppelink and put themselves in position to fight for a spot in the elimination round.

“We are a little bit surprised,” Xue admitted after the victory over the Europeans. “We definitely wanted to win the game but they’re a great team and have had a lot of success on the World Tour. In our pool, it’s quite clear that the Americans will take the top place and it’s left to the other three teams to fight for second place. This is a good step, but we have one more match against the Spanish (Liliana Fernandez and Elsa Baqueirozo) and we can’t let up now.”

The key, the experienced Xue, a 2013 world champion, says, is not letting obstacles that will inevitably get in the way create the feeling the task ahead is impossible.

“I often thought to myself ‘other teams are intensively preparing for the Olympics and we’re in quarantine’,” she explained. “But then I thought we shouldn’t think too much about it. We’ll just face our opponents in whatever form we’re in. I thought that would make us play without any pressure, but at the moment you’re here, as long as you have a desire to win in your heart, you’ll still feel some pressure. We’re just trying our best to relieve ourselves of this pressure and just leave everything we have out there on the court.”

Quick links:
Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 - Schedule and results
Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 - Beach volleyball
FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour
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