20/11/2019 20:00
European teams bag a record-breaking 146 medals from 2019 World Tour
News from the CEV
Luxembourg, November 20, 2019. The Beach Volleyball season ended this past Sunday in Mexico with a 4-Star event held in Chetumal – and what a tremendously successful year 2019 has been for European teams! They secured as many as 146 medals – which accounts for 58% of the 252 available on the World Tour since the first event held in early January in The Hague.
The detailed breakdown includes 52 gold, 46 silver and 48 bronze medals with men’s teams leading the way as they stood on top of the podium as many as 35 times – while securing another 31 silver and 31 bronze medal finishes.
The year that is drawing to an end included many highlights for European Beach Volleyball – and obviously the pinnacle came at the FIVB World Championships held in Hamburg, where European tandems completed a clean sweep of the men’s podium. Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Oleg Stoyanovskiy (pictured above) claimed a historic global crown for Russia – with German rising stars Julius Thole and Clemens Wickler finishing second, followed by two-time EuroBeachVolley winners Anders Berntsen Mol and Christian Sandlie Sørum of Norway. Krasilnikov and Stoyanovskiy became only the third European team to win men’s World Championship gold – after Julius Brink/Jonas Reckermann (GER) and Alexander Brouwer/Robert Meeuwsen (NED) achieved the same feat in 2009 and 2013, respectively.
Teams from Latvia and Spain qualified for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics at the event held in China in September
Moreover, European teams were triumphant and just as dominant at the Olympic qualifying event held in China back in September – where men’s teams from Italy and Latvia as well as women’s teams from Spain and Latvia secured a spot for their respective country in the Beach Volleyball competition of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
If that was not enough, the FIVB World Tour Finals held in Rome were further testament to Europe’s leading position on the international stage. Krasilnikov/Stoyanovskiy added this title to their ever-growing resume, while 2016 Olympic champion Laura Ludwig and her new partner Margareta Kozuch (GER) were the winners of the women’s competition at the iconic Foro Italico.
European Beach Volleyball does not only stand out with the results achieved by teams from the ‘Old Continent’. National Federations and their promoters were highly instrumental towards the delivery of a record-breaking number of World Tour events, with 42 out of 87 (47%) held on European soil across the year 2019.
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