Continental Cup Final: Ladies in the spotlight

The line-up of players and pairs composing the women’s national teams to take part in the CEV Continental Cup Final in the Hague and fight it out for the last remaining European berth in the Olympic tournament at Tokyo 2020 contains a number of well-known names from the high ranks of international beach volleyball. Here are some of the ladies to keep an eye on during the battles at Scheveningen:

36-year-old Vasiliki Arvaniti is probably the brightest star to grace the sand of the women’s Continental Cup Final. In her lasting career, the well-seasoned Greek athlete has won three EuroBeachVolley medals and has been on top of the podium twice, in 2005 and 2007. In fact, other than Marleen Ramond-van Iersel from the Netherlands’ home team line-up, Arvaniti will be the only European champion competing in the tournament. Arvaniti has taken part in six World Championships. Now she is aiming to play at the Olympics for the fourth time. After competing at Athens 2004, Beijing 2008 and London 2012 with three different partners, she could travel to Tokyo with yet a fourth different teammate, Panagiota Karagkouni.

Austrian duo Katharina Schutzenhofer & Lena Plesiutschnig are the highest ranked duo to compete at the Continental Cup Final. They are currently #25 in the FIVB World Ranking and just below the cut-off line in the Olympic Ranking, hence a team to watch. Both born in 1993, the now 27-year-old players have been partners for well over a decade now. In 2011, they won gold at the CEV U20 European Championship and silver at the FIVB U19 World Championship, and followed up with a U21 World Championship bronze in 2013. At the 2015 European Games in Baku, Schutzenhofer & Plesiutschnig made their first major senior-level podium, snatching the silver. In 2018 and 2019, they took their first medals on the FIVB World Tour, two golds, a silver and a bronze. More recently, they finished fifth at one of the three Cancun four-star events earlier this year.

Kinga Wojtasik & Katarzyna Kociolek are right below Schutzenhofer & Plesiutschnig in the Olympic Ranking. The Polish athletes, 31 and 26 years old, respectively, teamed up in September 2017 and medalled in their very first World Tour appearance as a pair, with a silver at the Qinzhou three-star in October. Their best achievement so far as a tandem, however, is the EuroBeachVolley 2019 silver in Moscow. Each of the two players has a lot to brag about individually too, especially with their podiums at age-category championships. Kociolek is a two-time world champion, in the U19 and U21 categories, a two-time European champ, in U18 and U20, and has won as many as seven more medals in top youth competitions. Wojtasik has been a world champ “only” once, at the 2009 U21 event in Blackpool, and has two youth continental silvers, but she can also brag about appearing at the most recent Olympic Games, Rio 2016.

The Continental Cup is a national team competition and, while having a strong leading pair can make a world of difference, a national team consists of four players and each of them can contribute to the collective success. If the quality of the entire squad is considered, then Russia clearly have the most depth to their roster, with four young, but very talented athletes, all with solid international experience. 26-year-old Ksenia Dabizha, 24-year-old Daria Rudykh, 21-year-old Maria Voronina and 19-year-old Mariia Bocharova have all won gold medals on the World Tour and at youth European Championships, and especially the younger duo, Voronina & Bocharova, have earned themselves the status of the true child prodigies of the beach volleyball world. They are the reigning youth Olympic champions from Buenos Aires 2018. That same year they also triumphed as U19 world champions. In addition, the young Russian pair have claimed as many as six continental titles at various age-group European Championships since 2017, including the most recent one, last month at the U22 event in Baden. At World Tour events in 2021, Voronina and Bocharova have been playing with different partners, but are getting back together for the Continental Cup Final in the Hague.