Latvian beach volleyball players will start the European Championship group tournament on Tuesday, September 15, at Majori beach in Jurmala.
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On Tuesday, Marta Ozoliņa and Luīze Skrastiņa, who were number 31 in the competition, will be the first Latvian athletes to go to the central square, finishing the second World Tour one-star competition in Vilnius last weekend.
They will be met in Group B by Laura Ludviga, a German who owns all possible beach volleyball titles and is led by Margaret Kozuha. Both weekends were up to the semi-finals of the “King of the Court” event in the Dutch city of Utrecht and were posted with the second number in Jūrmala. The match starts at 16.
At 5 pm, Krista Paegle and Kristīne Briede (26th) will go to Group G in the central square, which reached Vilnius until the quarterfinals. They will have to play with the Dutch – two-time European champion Sanni Kaiser and once-winner Madeleine Mepelinka (7th), who finished third in the King of the Court over the weekend.
At 6 pm in Group F, European U-20 champions Anete Namiķe and Varvara Brailko (27th) will meet the bronze medalists of the 2018 European competition, the Czech medalists Marku Slukov and Barbor Hermanov (6th), who also played in Utrecht, entering the second round.
At 7 pm, European champions Tīna Laura Graudiņa and Anastasija Kravčenoka will start playing in the central square, with the fifth number. Only they know how much nerves the Covid-19 virus found in Graudiņa’s analyzes at the end of August required and how many gaps it has punctured during the preparation period. The couple was already forced to give up going to the race in Utrecht, but the weekend is expected to have the same unpleasant time as it was last year, winning the title.
In group E, the first opponents of Latvians will be Finns Rīka Lehtonen and Nīna Ahtiainen (28).
All fights of Latvian athletes will take place in the first or central field.
This time in the group tournament, each team will not play with each, but the winners of the first game will find out the winner in the group, who will immediately enter the second round of the playoffs, and the losers – in the continuation of the extra team competition.
The European Beach Volleyball Championship in Jurmala will take place from September 15 to 20. The tournament for 32 pairs in the men’s and women’s competition will bring together the best European beach volleyball men’s duets from 16 countries and women’s duets from 13 countries.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the tournament is eligible for one of the strongest tournaments of the season in terms of status in the world.
The main contenders for the women’s tournament are the Swiss – Tanja Hübler / Nina Becart and Joan Heidrich / Anuka Verge-Depré, the Olympic champion Laura Ludviga from Germany, who will play with Margaret Kozuh, and Sanne Kaizere and Madeleine Mepelinka from the Netherlands Hermanova. The current champions are Graudiņa with Kravčenok.
Although the Olympic rankings related to the Covid-19 pandemic were frozen on March 16 this year, the European Championship is traditionally one of the tournaments in which teams compete for Olympic ranking points.
Volleyball players will also compete for a total prize pool of 200,000 euros.
The decision to organize the competition in Latvia was made at the meeting of the Board of the European Volleyball Confederation (CEV) on July 7, 2020.
In the previous European Championship in Jūrmala in 2017, Jānis Šmēdiņš and Aleksandrs Samoilovs became vice-champions. In August 2017, Šmēdiņš with Samoilov reached the final, where he lost to the Italians Daniel Lupo and Paolo Nikola, but the surprisingly high fifth place was won by Graudiņa and Kravčenoka, as well as Mārtiņš Pļaviņš with Harald Regza.
This year, the competitions of the World Tour stage were to take place in Jūrmala, but this tournament was postponed to the next year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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