Rio de Janeiro, August 6, 2016 – Australia’s Louise Bawden and Taliqua Clancy began their Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympic Games campaign with a 2-0 (21-15, 21-14) victory over Costa Rica’s Karen Cope Charles and Natalia Alfaro at the Copacabana Beach Arena on Saturday.
Here’s what they said after the match….
Louise Bawden, Australia
“We know we can create chances at the net by setting each other up high and using our physicality, some of them weren’t perfect but because we are aggressive they went in our favour.
“It is one step in the right direction. There are three steps in pool play and we have to make sure those are wins. It is also the way we are playing right now, that is really important for us. Trying to bring out the big game that we’re going for and with really attacking serving so that the next time we go on court we can pick up from there.”
Karen Cope Charles, Costa Rica
“For us it's making history. We are super proud of what we did. We know we are the first team ever to qualify here, but we still want to do good. We want to do a good job. We want to try to focus and we already qualified and now we are here, so we need to focus on doing our stuff and try to do it the best way possible.
“Actually we were just really excited, we just wanted to play. We were happy to have such a full stadium and people supporting us. We could hear them cheering for us and it was a nice feeling.
“We made a couple of mistakes, but nothing. It's already in the past and we have to focus on our next one.”