Vienna, Austria, August 3, 2018 – Doing well on your own home tournament is always a priority for beach volleyball players and there is no better way to build confidence for it than with good results. Nadezda Makroguzova and Svetlana Kholomina seem to be in the right track as they scored some big victories in the weeks leading to the FIVB World Tour four-star event in Moscow.
The Russians were the most surprising team in the women’s tournament of the A1 Major Vienna presented by Swatch as they took down the number one and number two teams in the world, Canada’s Heather Bansley/Brandie Wilkerson and Sarah Pavan/Melissa-Humana Paredes, before they were eliminated by Brazil’s Carolina Solberg and Maria Elisa Antonelli, the third-best ranked tandem in the planet right now.
Their good result in the Austrian capital is just a reflex of the progress the Russians achieved in just their first season together. They had eight top-ten finishes in ten international tournaments played in 2018. Kholomina and Makroguzova have also already enjoyed some home success as they won the one-star tournament in Anapa back in July.
The duo has been a force in under-age tournaments as well as they have won back-to-back editions of the Under-22 European Championships. Their most recent victory in the event happened just last weekend, in Jurmala, Latvia.
Kholomina and Makroguzova will be the highest-seeded Russian team entering the tournament in Moscow at 12th. The rising stars will try to give their country a gold medal in home soil in a big tournament for the first time since 2013, when Ekaterina Birlova and Evgeniya Ukolova topped the podium in Anapa.