Ostrava 4-star to draw the line on Olympic qualifying

The final 4-star FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour event that counts towards Olympic qualifying on the road to Tokyo 2020 has already started. With a couple of country quota matches, the J&T Banka Ostrava Beach Open 2021 got under way on Tuesday in Czechia’s third largest city. The unique venue at the Lower Vitkovice industrial heritage site in Ostrava welcomes beach volleyball’s international elite for the third time, after the fabulous tournaments in 2018 and 2019 and a pandemic-prompted cancellation in 2020.

An amazing array of 144 teams (74 men’s and 70 women’s duos) from 36 different countries, representing all five continental confederations, have signed up to play in Ostrava. The US$ 300,000 prize money tournament will continue with Wednesday’s qualifications and will last through Sunday, June 6, when the two sets of medals will be awarded.

The first country quota fixture of the day was a match that could have put a stop to the Olympic aspirations of USA’s Kerri Walsh Jennings and Brooke Sweat, had they lost it. It didn’t. In a very tight and competitive game, with several changes in the lead, their experience paid off with a straight-set 2-0 (21-18, 21-19) win over Emily Day and Sara Hughes.

In the German country quota match, Kim Behrens and Sandra Ittlinger prevailed over Leonie Kortzinger and Chantal Laboureur on the way to an emphatic 2-0 (21-15, 21-11) victory, with Ittlinger acing for the winning point.

A 32-team main draw will feature a modified pool play system with the top three duos in each four-team pool advancing to the single elimination phase in each gender. The pool winners will advance straight to the eighthfinals, while the pool runners-up and the third-placed pairs will have the chance to make it there through the round of 24. With 24 pairs per gender seeded directly into the main draw, the remaining eight vacancies will be filled in Wednesday’s qualifications.

While the preliminary seeding contains a pretty much regular line-up of highest-calibre beach volleyball stars, led by reigning women’s world champs Sarah Pavan and Melissa Humana-Paredes of Canada and FIVB World Ranking leaders Anders Mol and Christian Sorum of Norway on the men’s side, the main focus this time will be on the answers to the few remaining questions as to who will claim the last remaining spots at the Tokyo Olympics, available through World Tour ranking points.

How are three-time Olympic champion and four-time Olympic medallist Walsh Jennings and her partner Sweat going to react to being pushed down by rising stars Sarah Sponcil and Kelly Claes in the race for the second US spot at Tokyo last week in Sochi?

The Olympic berths will be officially known with the updated rankings after the end of the tournament in eastern Czechia, but surely everyone has already done their calculations and knows if they have already secured their trip to Tokyo or what needs to happen in Ostrava in order to do so. So, the well-seasoned Walsh Jennings and Sweat will have to take 160 points or more above what their young compatriots Sponcil and Claes tally in the tournament to regain their qualifying position in the provisional Olympic ranking. They have a reasonable chance, especially if they repeat or improve on their fourth-place finish at the last Ostrava tournament two years ago.

“One down, eight to go,” Walsh Jennings exclaimed after their victory in Tuesday’s country quota game.

While this is pretty much the only question to be answered in the ladies’ race, it is more complicated on the men’s side, where seven teams still have a shot at snatching one of the three Olympic quotas still up for grabs, outside the contest for the American spots, which has yet to be resolved too.

Just above the cut-off line ahead of Ostrava, in ascending order, are Marco Grimalt and Esteban Grimalt of Chile (6,140 points), Sochi winners Piotr Kantor and Bartosz Losiak of Poland (6,340), and Adrian Carambula and Enrico Rossi of Italy (6,380). Just below it, in descending order, are Aleksandrs Samoilovs and Janis Smedins of Latvia (6,120), Adrian Heidrich and Mirco Gerson of Switzerland (5,880), Sochi bronze medallists Christiaan Varenhorst and Steven van de Velde of the Netherlands (5,880), and Nils Ehlers and Lars Fluggen of Germany (5,700). The difference between the Italians and the Germans is only 680 points with everyone else squeezed in between and ready for the final scuffle.

And of course, there is the three-way contest to fill the two-teams-per-country maximum for the United States, with Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb lagging 360 points behind fellow Americans Jake Gibb and Taylor Crabb, and Nick Lucena and Phil Dalhausser.

The line-up of 24 teams seeded directly into the women’s main draw consists of three pairs each from Brazil, Czechia, Germany and USA, two each from Canada and Switzerland, and one each from Austria, Italy, Japan, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia and Spain. The men’s list includes three duos each from Czechia and USA and two each from Brazil, Germany, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland and Russia, with the remaining four teams representing Chile, Norway, Qatar and Spain.

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