Stefan Boermans and Yorick de Groot will be in the semifinals of a FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour 4-star event for the first time on Saturday, after the Dutchmen won a pair of elimination matches on Friday in Gstaad and made it to the final four of the tournament in the Swiss Alps.
Boermans and De Groot make it to Gstaad semifinals
The Dutch are among the four best teams of a World Tour event for the first time
Published 07:03, 09 Jul 2021
Partners on the World Tour since March, the 26-year-old Boermans and the 21-year-old De Groot have been close to the semifinals twice before as they were fifth at both the second and the third events of the Cancun Hub between the end of April and the start of May.
In Gstaad, they made the extra step they couldn’t in Mexico and defeated two German teams to guarantee their presence in the last day of competition for the men in the Swiss Alps. The Dutch, who are still undefeated in the event, opened the day with a strong 2-1 (19-21, 21-13, 15-8) Round of 16 victory over Julius Thole and Clemens Wickler, the silver medallists of the 2019 FIVB World Championship.
In the quarterfinals, they met Nils Ehlers and Lars Fluggen, their opponents in their first match in Gstaad. The Pool B opener went three sets but in the elimination round the Dutch came out stronger and got the job done faster, with a 2-0 (21-19, 21-16) win.
Boermans hits during the match against Ehlers and Fluggen
The last team standing between the Dutch and the gold medal match is another duo that reached the semifinals for the first time. Russians Nikita Liamin and Taras Myskiv, who started their participation in the tournament back on Monday, in the country quota, continue on a roll and have now won seven matches in a row in Gstaad.
The pair, who have three fifth-place finishes since they became partners in 2019, hit the sand twice on Friday and won two tie-breakers – the first a 27-29, 21-13, 15-12 Round of 16 win over Norway’s Hendrik Mol and Mathias Berntsen and the second a quarterfinal 13-21, 21-10, 15-11 victory over Poland’s Piotr Kantor and Bartosz Losiak – on their way to the semifinals.
Liamin and Myskiv have won all of their seven matches in Gstaad
The second semifinal will feature Russia’s Oleg/Stoyanoviskiy/Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Qatar’s Cherif Younousse/Ahmed Tijan. Stoyanovskiy and Krasilnikov, who started the event in Gstaad with a defeat, have now won four in a row after a pair of strong straight-set victories on Friday. In the Round of 16, the Russians eliminated Latvian veterans Aleksandrs Samoilovs and Janis Smedins with a 2-0 (21-13, 21-18). In the quarterfinals, they prevailed over FIVB World Ranking leaders Anders Mol and Christian Sorum of Norway, also in two sets (21-16, 21-19).
Cherif and Ahmed did the same with a pair of dramatic victories. In the Round of 16, they eliminated Poland’s Grzegorz Fijalek and Michal Bryl in a close 2-0 (22-20, 21-19) match. Later, in the quarterfinals, they had an even longer battle with Brazil’s Evandro Goncalves and Bruno Schmidt but emerged victorious after three sets (16-21, 21-15, 21-19).
“Playing in the rain and with cooler temperatures hasn’t been easy for us,” Cherif said. “We come from a completely different weather but we’ve been managing to do it. I’ve heard the weather is going to be better over the weekend and I’m glad we’ll still be playing by then.”
The men’s competition in Gstaad comes to an end on Saturday, when the semifinals and the medal matches will be played in the Swiss Alps.
