São Paulo, Brazil, September 25, 2014 — Capping off another exciting day of professional beach volleyball, 32 men’s teams completed the last two of three pool matches at the double-gender US$800,000 FIVB São Paulo Grand Slam. The top 24 teams, representing the top three from eight pools, advance to the single-elimination rounds that start Friday. Appearing in Brazil at least once a year for 28 consecutive years, the FIVB World Tour stop is being held in São Paulo through Sunday in a purpose-built venue on the grounds of the Barueri Arena.
Earning a bye into the second round of elimination play on Friday are two teams each from host country Brazil, Canada and the United States along with one tandem each from Germany and Netherlands.
SCHEDULE
The last of 10 FIVB Grand Slams on the 2014 FIVB World Tour calendar, the FIVB São Paulo Grand Slam has been using the FIVB format of a single-day qualification tournament on Tuesday for women and men to determine the final eight spots in each gender’s 32-team main draw tournaments, round-robin pool play began on Wednesday for both genders. It will conclude with a single-elimination bracket for the final 24 teams.
Women’s and men’s single-elimination play starts on Friday, playing three rounds through the round of 16 and the quarterfinals On Saturday, the women’s and men’s semifinals will be played along with the two bronze medal matches. The women’s and men’s gold medal matches and awarding ceremony closing the FIVB São Paulo Grand Slam will conclude the event on Sunday.
FIVB PURSE, TOURNEY TOTALS
The FIVB São Paulo Grand Slam is the 310th FIVB men’s tournament since its first event in 1987 and the 27rrd FIVB women’s tournament since FIVB began women’s competitions in 1992. There has been at least one FIVB World Tour event in Brazil since it started 28 years ago and this is the 36th men’s and 31st women’s event held in Brazil.
Gold medal winning teams in each gender in São Paulo will split $57,000, silver will receive $43,000, bronze medalists get $32,000 and the fourth place finishers will earn $24,000 of the $800,000 total purse.
3-0 POOL WINNERS
The six teams who won their respective pools with unblemished 3-0 records to earn a bye in the first round of single elimination were Brazil’s top-seeded Alison Cerutti/Bruno Oscar Schmidt, USA’s fifth-seeded John Hyden/Tri Bourne, Brazil’s sixth-seeded Ricardo Santos/Emanuel Rego, USA’s ninth-seeded Jake Gibb/Casey Patterson, Canada’s 15th-seeded Chaim Schalk/Ben Saxton and Canada’s 23rd-seeded Josh Binstock/Sam Schachter.
MORE POOL WINNERS
Winning their pools with 2-1 records to move to the second round of elimination play on Saturday were Netherlands’ 13th-seeded Reinder Nummerdor/Christiaan Varenhorst and Germany’s 30th-seeded Sebastian Dollinger/Marcus Popp.
OTHER TOP 10 SEEDS
Four of the tournament’s top 10 seeds won their respective pools.
While not winning their respective pools, four of the other six top-10 seeds did enough to advance from pool play to Friday’s start of single elimination play.
Moving forward are Poland’s second-seeded Mariusz Prudel/Grzegorz Fijalek, Latvia’s fourth-seeded Aleksandrs Samoilovs/Janis Smedins, Russia’s eighth-seeded Vicheslav Krasilnikov/Konstantin Semenov and Austria’s 10th-seeded Clemens Doppler/Alexander Horst.
Eliminated from following after pool play from among the top 10 seeds were Brazil’s third-seeded Pedro Salgado/Alvaro Filho (1-2) and Spain’s seventh-seeded Pablo Herrera/Adrian Gavira (1-2).
LEGENDS A NEW TEAM
Brazil’s iconic Olympians Ricardo Santos/Emanuel Rego are in their first FIVB World Tour event in five years and started their homecoming in style by winning their second and third pool play matches Thursday to win their pool with a perfect 3-0 mark.
On Thursday, battled through another two three-set matches. The legends of the sand opened by defeating Germany’s 22nd-seeded Armin Dollinger/Clemens Wickler, 21-18, 19-21 and 15-8 in 53 minutes. In the late afternoon, Brazil’s Ricardo/Emanuel pleased their home country fans with another exciting three-set win, this one over Netherland’s 11th-seeded 2013 FIVB World Champions Alexander Brouwer/Robert Meeuwsen, 21-19, 20-22 and 15-12 in 55 minutes.
Brazil’s Emanuel reflected following his team’s second win on Thursday, “ We are putting together the partnership all over again and to experience some difficulties during our matches is just part of the process. We have to feel how our opponents are playing. Physically we are good, we played two three-set matches today. We kept a cool head to turn the play and used our experience to win. Our objective was to advance directly to the second elimination round to save energy. We accomplished that goal to start with here in Brazil.”
MORE QUOTES
John Hyden (USA): “It felt pretty good, we didn't play so well and take care of opportunities in set two, then we took care of those opportunities in set three which got us that win. In set two we didn't take care of the ball and we let it get away from us, and in set three we made all the plays. It has been a really, really long season, but we want to finish strong here. We know it's the last FIVB Grand Slam and everybody's like 'ah, we get a rest after this', but we'd really like to get a good finish here, we've won our pool a lot of times and lost the first match out, so we don't want to do that here. We've done a lot better this year than I think our expectations were. We wanted to fight, train hard and play up to the potential we have, and I think we've done that."
Chaim Schalk (CAN): It was back and forth, and it seemed like there were a lot of momentum shifts in the match. It was probably one of the best matches we've played all year, we kept coming back after giving up a few points. Fijalek was serving really tough, so that made it rough on us, but we ended up coming back and coming back strong. When they saved match point to push it to extra points in the third set, the way we bounced back by siding out four or five in a row before we took over was huge. It was a big win for us and we're excited for the single-elimination bracket..
BRAZILIAN HOMECOMING
As the host nation, Brazil has six teams in the men’s main draw. Brazil had four men’s teams pre-seeded into the main draw and two more teams emerged from Tuesday’s qualification tournament. For the men, the Brazilian teams in the main draw and their record so far overall is 11-7 and individually is Marcio Araujo/Fabio Luiz Magalhaes (0-3), Alison Cerutti/Bruno Oscar Schmidt (3-0), Pedro Salgado/Alvaro Filho (1-2) and Ricardo Santos/Emanuel Rego (3-0). The men’s qualification teams from Brazil who advanced and their overall tournament records are Gustavo Carvalhaes/Allison Cittadin (2-1) and Vitor Felipe/Evandro Goncalves (1-2). The two teams that did not advance are Araujo/Magalhaes and Salgado/Filho.