Wagrain-Kleinarl, Austria, March 22, 2018. The very first CEV Snow Volleyball European Championship will start on Friday early morning (9:30 CET) with the opening round of women’s pool play. The 24 women’s teams will contest all of their pool matches on Friday, with the top two from each one of the eight pools progressing to the elimination stage of the eagerly anticipated tournament. As for the men, pool play will end on Saturday morning and determine the 16 teams remaining in contention for the title of first-ever Snow Volleyball European champions. Live streaming of all matches played in the iconic Salzburg Snow Space Arena will be available on the CEV’s YouTube channel as well as on the CEV’s official Facebook Snow Volleyball page.

Teams from as many as 18 countries have travelled to Wagrain-Kleinarl for the inaugural continental showpiece and the anticipation is mounting. “This is the place where the history of Snow Volleyball started ten years ago and at that time only a few could have predicted that a decade later we would have come together with so many people and players from across the whole of Europe for the first-ever European Snow Volleyball Championship,” said Martin Kaswurm from local promoter Chaka 2.

The first ones to take to the court at the iconic venue set up in Wagrain-Kleinarl, at an altitude of some 1,850 m, will be the 2017 and 2018 ‘Queens of the Snow’, Anna Dostalova/Michaela Knoblochova of the Czech Republic and Turkey’s Bugra Eryildiz/Aleyna Vence. The top-seeded Czechs will play Latvia’s Alise Lece/Ilze Liepinlauska while Eryildiz/Vence – winners of as many as three gold medals on the 2018 European Tour – will take on Slovakia’s Alica Bertova and Lenka Vandakova.

The two teams from the Czech Republic and Turkey are definitely among the medal contenders, together with representatives from Russia and some more underdogs. “We have travelled to Austria with the intention to stay in the competition up until Sunday, when the medals will be at stake and we would love to feature in the very last game of the tournament,” said Ekaterina Syrtseva. She will carry Russia’s hopes of glory in the #EuroSnowVolley together with Ksenia Khakimzanova - with whom she won gold at last year’s European Tour stop in Plan de Corones / Kronplatz, Italy. Syrtseva has achieved further success in Beach Volleyball as well, together with 2006 European champion Alexandra Moiseeva who is now having a break from competition after becoming a mother for a second time about a week ago.



The women’s competition features all of the winners of the 2018 European Tour – Eryildiz/Vence with three titles, Dostalova/Knoblochova, Urte Andriukaityte/Irina Zobnina from Lithuania and Italy’s Cristiana Parenzan/Tania Ferrazzo. The Italians were the surprising gold medal winners from the event held in Roccaraso, where they beat Turkey’s ‘golden girls’ in the final after upsetting the 2016 ‘Queens of the Snow’ Greta Cicolari and Giulia Toti in the semis. “We have come to Austria in order to play a good tournament and not simply to enjoy the experience and participate,” said 48-year-old Parenzan, the oldest player in the competition and a gold medallist from the 2007 and 2009 editions of the CEV European Volleyball Veteran Championships.

The inaugural #EuroSnowVolley features two Olympians – Austria’s Alexander Huber and Switzerland’s Sébastien Chevallier, who competed at Rio 2016 and London 2012, respectively. They will be chasing further glory on the Austrian Alps after earlier this winter they added the Snow Volleyball national championship title to the Beach Volleyball crown they had taken back in 2017. However, they will face stiff competition especially from Russia – whose teams have taken top honours from as many as five European Tour stops, with Ruslan Daianov/Taras Myskiv standing on top of the podium three times to claim the title of ‘2018 Kings of the Snow’.