Favorites and dark horses win gold with dominant performances

The 2024 CEV EuroBeachVolley, which came to an end on Sunday in The Hague, was a testament to the incredible depth of European beach volleyball as while the women’s winners Svenja Müller and Cinja Tillmann of Germany figured among the favorites to win gold since the start, Latvians Martins Plavins and Kristians Fokerots starred in one of the most surprising and unlikely journeys to glory in the tournament’s 32-year history.

Ranked seventh in the world, the 23-year-old Müller and the 33-year-old Tillmann arrived in the Netherlands fresh from a ninth-place finish at the Paris Olympics. The bronze medalists of the 2022 FIVB World Championship, the team also won gold at the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour Vienna Elite16, the last event before the Paris Games.

In the Netherlands, the Germans were dominant, ending the week with seven wins and just one set dropped, in the quarterfinals, where they got revenge over Latvians Tina Graudina and Anastasija Samoilova, who had eliminated them in Paris one week earlier.

Their victory gave Germany a record ninth gold medal among the women at the EuroBeachVolley, helping keep the country as the most successful nation in the event, with 25 women’s medals and 37 overall.

Plavins, 39, and Fokerots, 19, on the other hand, were nobody’s pick to win gold in the Netherlands. That’s because the two were still on the reserve list just four days before the start of the event and only got to play in their first EuroBeachVolley as partners thanks to last-minute withdrawals.

Plavins, a London 2012 Olympic bronze medalist and a three-time Olympian, and Fokerots, a U19 world champion and a U18 and U20 European champion, had played together in just six Beach Pro Tour events prior to the EuroBeachVolley, getting a pair of medals at the Futures level.

In the Netherlands, they gained confidence from a pair of three-set victories in pool play and never looked back, ending the week undefeated with seven wins and topping Paris Olympic silver medalists Nils Ehlers and Clemens Wickler of Germany in the tie-breaker to claim gold in a spectacular way.

Their victory was just second for Latvian men at the EuroBeachVolley, following a triumph by Aleksandrs Samoilovs and Janis Smedins in 2015, and gave their country its seventh men’s medal and tenth overall in the event.