19/05/2019 23:30
Juantorena and Egonu the superstars of historic #SuperFinalsBerlin
CEV Champions League Volley 2019 Super Finals
Berlin, Germany, May 19, 2019. Osmany Juantorena and Paola Egonu are the Most Valuable Players of the historic CEV Champions League Volley 2019 Super Finals held on Saturday in Berlin. Many elite players featured in the ‘Volleyball event of the year’, but Osmany and Paola were highly instrumental towards the success of their respective teams. Their stories are similar and yet quite different at the same time.
Juantorena has been one of the world’s best players for more than decade. After starting his career in Cuba, he moved and switched allegiance to Italy. Osmany, whose uncle Alberto was a double gold medallist at the 1976 Olympics in athletics, celebrated in Berlin his third #CLVolleyM triumph, after seizing Europe’s most coveted crown in 2010 and 2011 with TRENTINO Volley. The outstanding outside hitter had to wait for eight years to celebrate another such accolade – but his leading role in Cucine Lube CIVITANOVA’s victory over Zenit KAZAN was just obvious.
“This MVP award goes to the whole team,” Osmany said. “This is a great group. We started the match a bit too nervous but we regrouped at the beginning of the second set and we eventually seized this Champions League title, which an Italian team had not won for quite a while,” added the 2016 Olympic silver medallist with Team Italy. “This week we made history in Italian Volleyball,” he continued, referring to Cucine Lube’s success in the Italian national league earlier this week.
If Juantorena has been around for quite a while, Paola Egonu has skyrocketed to the global Volleyball elite at the age of 20. After winning silver at last year’s World Championship in Japan where she scored as many as 324 points, Egonu helped Igor Gorgonzola NOVARA claim their first European trophy – starting right with the most prestigious one. The opposite hitter of Nigerian descent was just unstoppable in the four sets she contested in Berlin against the team she will be playing for next year – Imoco Volley CONEGLIANO.
At 20, Egonu shared this accolade with Francesca Piccinini, who won her seventh European crown at the age of 40. “We are both 20,” she joked after the match, “only Francesca is just a two-time 20-year-old lady!” You can be quite sure that this was only the first such title for Egonu, who has at least more than a decade at her disposal to equal Piccinini’s feat.
For further information, visit the official event website http://clvolley.cev.eu.
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