Kantor and Losiak have no time to waste

A team can play the elite-level FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour in different ways, but not many top-level pairs are as fun to watch as Piotr Kantor and Bartosz Losiak.

The Polish stars have developed a unique style of play which has captivated a huge legion of fans across the world and delighted many more everywhere they have been over the last 11 years.

The style that Kantor and Losiak worked years to develop and successfully use on the World Tour is predicated on a fast-paced and diverse offence, which makes it almost impossible for blockers and defenders across the net to anticipate their moves.

Besides preferring quick sets to higher, slower ones, the Poles have such a level of chemistry that they can hit the ball from any point and create a true nightmare for their opponents.

“Sometimes players come to us and joke that we should stop playing like this, that it’s not fair,” Losiak says, laughing. “We know our system is very difficult for blockers as they have to move all the time and they never know what we’re going to do. We wanted to create a new style and we were confident that it could take us where we wanted to go. It feels good to have brought something new to beach volleyball.”

Their inspiration, they say, was the indoor volleyball game, where the hard surface and the presence of six players on the court, including a specialized setter, make it easier to play an up-tempo game.

The risks of this approach have never worried them, and over the last years the number of teams taking a page from Kantor and Losiak’s book to incorporate into their own games has increased substantially, validating their successful strategy.

“Of course playing with all this speed can result in more mistakes, because it’s more difficult to backset and to play with the ball closer to the net all the time, but we’re willing to take the risk,” Losiak, the defender explains. “The key is to handset all the time because that’s how we can control the situation. It feels good to see that we created a style that other teams are trying to adopt.”

Risk, of course, can be mitigated with repetition and that’s something Kantor and Losiak haven’t really had a shortage of. Born only 11 days apart in 1992, the two Poles were school friends and have been competing internationally together since 2009, when they were just 17.

They had remarkable success during their youth careers, winning the U-19, U-21 and U-23 FIVB World Championships and four European age-group titles. And there were no doubts they would be just as good at the senior level.

That certainly proved to be true over the last decade. Kantor, the World Tour’s Most Improved Player in 2016, and Losiak, the Best Setter in the following season, compiled 14 medals – two golds, six silver and six bronze – in 89 international events together over the period.

Their record includes important results including victories in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and on home sand in Warsaw two years later, but they feel the best is still ahead of them.

Securing better results at the Olympics after finishing 17th in Rio in 2016 and fighting for a medal at the World Championships, where their best finish in three appearances is a fifth in Vienna in 2017, are among their main goals.

“We are still young and I think we can play better and with more stability, which is important for us,” Losiak says. “We want to keep the same level in all tournaments and I feel that each season, as we get more and more experienced, we play better than the previous one. We’ve had some good finishes, but we think we still need an important result in a big tournament, such as the Olympic Games or the World Championships.”

Read more: Roster 100 to showcase stars of volleyball and beach volleyball

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