Leuven one-star "the cherry on top of the cake" for Belgian beach volleyball

In a typical calendar year, the Belgian Beach Tour will host anywhere from five to 10 events, with tournaments being hosted in Flanders, Antwerp, East Flanders, Flemish Brabant, West Flanders, Limburg, and Leuven, among others.

Any evidence you’d need that the sport is growing here is to take a tour of the new facility at the Katholieke Universiteit just outside of the Leuven city centre, home to three fantastic indoor beach volleyball courts and a world class gym fit to be an Olympic training centre. Indeed, slowly but surely, the sport is growing in Belgium. In 2019, Belgium hosted its first FIVB event in nearly two decades, a one-star event in Knokke-Heist. Two years later, after a pandemic-altered 2020, the FIVB is returning to Belgium once more, to Leuven, where both men and women will compete in another one-star.

“We come here every year for the Belgian Beach Tour,” said Jean-Francois Laboulle, a member of the Leuven-based Lizards Volleyball Club who was setting up for the event. “But the World Tour? This is just the cherry on the cake.”

It’s a cherry, all right. The tournament is being held smack dab in the city centre, with the historic Library of the Catholic University of Leuven providing a stunning backdrop on one end, and St. Peter’s, one of the country’s most iconic landmarks, towering in the background of the other. If one of the objects of one-star tournaments is to grow beach volleyball in countries where it has not had a traditionally strong presence – the Cook Islands, Israel, Bulgaria, Belgium, Slovenia, Hungary, to name a few – then Leuven has more than hit its mark.

Promising talent from all over the globe will be descending upon Leuven this week for the occasion, including 2019 Knokke-Heist gold medallists Jeremy Silvestre and Florian Gosselin of France. Headlining the field, of course, is the host team, Dries Koekelkoren and Tom van Walle, who finished the 2018 season ranked No. 12 in the world, ahead of many current Olympians.

They are joined at the top of the field by Brazil’s Saymon Barbosa and Adrielson Dos Santos Silva, who are making their FIVB debut as a team. After a tremendous 2019 season with Guto Carvalhaes, Barbosa is playing in Leuven with his third partner in as many tournaments after failing to make it out of the qualifier in the previous two events, in Chetumal of 2020 and Doha earlier this spring.

Similar to the men, one of the top teams in the women’s field is, ironically, in the qualifier. While fourteenth-seeded Americans Zana Muno and Crissy Jones did not win a gold medal in Belgium in 2019 as Silvestre and Gosselin did – nor could they, given that the event was men’s only – they enter as one of the most talented teams in the tournament. It was only two years ago that they made a brilliant entrance onto the AVP Tour, emerging from the 47th seed in the qualifier in Hermosa Beach to finish third in their first professional main draw event. They’d follow Hermosa with three straight top-10 finishes on the AVP, in Manhattan Beach, Chicago, and Waikiki. Now they’re making their World Tour debut as a team, in Muno’s first professional FIVB event and Jones’ second (she finished fifth in Cambodia in 2019 with Traci Callahan, who is currently competing in the Rwanda two-star).

Of course, they’ll first have to navigate Thursday’s qualifier, beginning as the 14 seed. Then comes the main draw, which is headed by Venezuela’s Norisbeth Gonzalez and Gabriela Brito, who have won a pair of silver medals this season in Bulgaria one-star events.

A gold here in Leuven would be, as Labouelle said, “the cherry on top of the cake.”

Quick links:
FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour - Leuven
Olympic Games Tokyo 2020
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