OSTRAVA, Czech Republic — If it felt like a long time since we’ve seen Sweden’s David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig atop a podium, it’s because, relatively speaking, it was.
Heading into this week’s Ostrava Elite, five straight Elite events had been won by a team not named Sweden — Norway, England, Norway again, Cuba, the Netherlands — the longest such streak of Ahman and Hellvig’s career.
That’s a preposterously high rate of success, one matched only by Anders Mol and Christian Sorum, who have won more gold medals as a team than all but one pair in Beach Pro Tour history. And it’s a rate that has once again added another tally to the ledger, with Ahman and Hellvig’s undefeated run to a second consecutive Ostrava gold, one won in thrilling fashion against Mol and Sorum, 28-30, 21-17, 15-7.
“It feels so good that we played so good that match,” Hellvig said afterwards. “I’m super, super happy to have the gold again.”
Sweden saved their best performance for last, as Hellvig added 10 blocks to his tournament-leading total of 36, eight more than even Mol. It was his second straight double-digit blocking performance, coming off an 11-block shutdown of Poland’s Bartosz Losiak and Michal Bryl, who finished fourth, dropping to the Czech Republic’s Ondrej Perusic and David Schweiner for bronze.
Sweden’s 12 wins now puts them tied with Alison and Bruno at No. 9 all time, passing Ze Marco and Ricardo and Marcio and Fabio.
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Thamela, Victoria in conversation as one of the best teams in the world
It could have been dismissed as a honeymoon phase and little more when Thamela Coradelli and Victoria Lopes won a bronze medal in their second event last summer, at the Hamburg Elite. But then they did it again, winning in Joao Pessoa, and again, taking bronze in Rio…and again with a gold in the second event of the 2025 season in Saquarema.
Seven events, four medals. That’s no honeymoon phase.
That’s a bona fide contender in any event they enter.
They more than contended in Ostrava — they won their second gold medal of the season, finishing the tournament on three consecutive sweeps to claim their fifth medal in eight events as a team.
They didn’t make it easy, either. No, a loss to Tina Graudina and Anastasija Samoilova – a preview of the gold medal match to come four days later – dropped them into the first round of playoffs, where they met the No. 1 team in the world in Kristen Nuss and Taryn Brasher, the team they had just played for gold in Saquarema. They survived that bout, winning 15-21, 21-19, 15-13, and never looked back, rattling off four more playoff wins to claim the $40,000 prize purse and 1,200 points, all but sealing their berth into this fall’s World Championships.
For Graudina and Samoilova, the silver medal is their first in an Elite since the 2022 Paris Elite, although it’s not been long since they’ve been on a podium, having won bronze at the Beach Pro Tour Finals in December.
They are the fourth consecutive team to lose in the round of 12, be brought back into the tournament by virtue of point differential to earn a seat in the quarterfinals and then make the final.
“Honestly losing that was the best thing that could have happened to us,” Graudina said after a semifinal win over Anouk Verge-Depre and Zoe Verge-Depre. Speaking of…
Verge-Depre sisters make first podium a poetic one
A year ago at this event, Anouk Verge-Depre and Zoe Verge-Depre were on the other sides of the net, battling for the final Swiss spot in the Paris Olympic Games. They met in the qualifier, where Anouk prevailed, though she ultimately wouldn’t do enough in the tournament to jump Zoe and Esmee Bobner in the Olympic rankings.
It was the last time – potentially ever – they played against one another.
Suffice it to say, with a bronze medal in hand, they’re glad for it.
“One year ago, we were battling against each other,” Anouk said after their bronze medal win. “My sister won the race for the Olympics right here and it was quite emotional. I was really focused on writing a new history with her and I’m super happy we got rewarded with a bronze medal.”
The bronze, won over Austria’s Dorina and Ronja Klinger, is Anouk’s first Elite medal since the Vienna Elite last summer, and Zoe’s first since the Brasilia Elite last spring.
“It’s amazing because we just started,” Zoe said. “We’re a fresh team. To end it in a highlight like this gives us the confidence and it was really beautiful to play here.”
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The Klinger Sisters are no fluke
When Ronja Klinger and Dorina Klinger began this season with a trio of top-fives, making it four straight when dating back to last year’s Rio Elite16, it still could have been easy to write them off as a good-but-not-yet-great team, a shooting star that was on a hot streak that could soon flare out. They hadn’t, after all, medaled in an event of significance, and still, after a fourth in Ostrava, haven’t.
But in Ostrava, it was made ever-clearer just how legitimate they are. The 27-year-old Dorina – Dory, as most know her – and 25-year-old Ronja logged their first career win over Germany’s Cinja Tillmann and Svenja Muller, the 2 seed coming off a bronze medal at the Saquarema Elite in April. It is just the latest in their notable wins, which include, in 2025 alone, a stunner over Paris Olympic gold medalists Ana Patricia Silva and Duda Lisboa, Kelly Cheng and Molly Shaw, and Quintana Roo Elite winners Carol Salgado and Rebecca Cavalcanti.
They could once have been considered, not incorrectly, as plucky underdogs, young and talented sisters from a country not known for tremendous success in this sport who might win a match or two here and there but shouldn’t be taken as a legitimate threat to podium with frequency. They can no longer be considered as such.
Alas, they’ve shaken off the fifth-place finishes, taking a fourth in Ostrava. It wasn’t the podium finish they wanted, but it still marks the best finish for an Austrian women’s team ever.
Fourth stings, yes, but the sting will subside, and the inexorable, undeniable progress of the Klinger Sisters will continue.
There is no place like Ostrava
I’d never been to Ostrava before. This came as a surprise to many of the players and staff, given how much I’ve covered and played and coached the game for the last eight years. It was one of the few remaining venues and sites on my beach volleyball bucket list.
It should be on yours.
I’ve never seen a sporting venue like it. I believe that the foundation of the Beach Pro Tour – of beach volleyball in general – should be the beach, and the natural beauty of the city or country hosting the event. Ostrava, a city built around its robust mining and metallurgical industry, does that, in a manner as unique and spectacular as anything I’ve seen in sports. My wife, Delaney, who has played in both Prague and Brno and loves the Czech Republic, asked if it’s as cool as it looks on TV.
Even cooler.
Way cooler.
On TV it looks tight and charming. In person, it is massive, a steel city that weaves around the courts. You can climb and get a birds-eye view of the second court, which is tucked under a tower and piping made of, as I learned, pig iron. A distinctly European-style walkway snakes through the venue, decorated with food and beer trucks and tasteful sponsor tents and fan activations: cross-net and corn hole and various tailgate games. There’s a subtle VIP section, a practice court just for fans.
It’s one of the cleanest, most professionally-run events, at a venue very much deserving of it.
If you haven’t been, you must, because even though I’ve now been, I know that it is a tournament to which I must now return, on a hopefully annual basis.
“It’s an incredible place to play,” David Ahman said. “This venue is unlike anything else in the world. We really like playing here and the fans are amazing.”
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I’m challenging TCU’s lineup!
During the 2025 NCAA Beach season, Anhelina Khmil played on court four for TCU, where she’d finish with a National Championship in hand, TCU’s first.
Three weeks later, reunited with her Beach Pro Tour partner, Valenyna Davidova, Khmil beat the best team in the world, stunning Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth in what is the biggest upset – objectively and subjectively – of the 2025 season. I texted TCU coach Hector Gutierrez that night and informed him I’d be retroactively challenging his lineup, seeing as he buried Khmil on court four.
In truth, his lineup was so rich with talent it isn’t crazy for Hector to have put Khmil where he did. She hadn’t, after all, had much success on the Beach Pro Tour in nearly a year, her last significant finish coming at the Stare Jablonki Challenge in May of 2024, where she finished fifth out of the qualifier.
The run she and Davidova put together in Ostrava was remarkable, first toppling a team that had made the podium in every event, then upsetting Italy’s Valentina Gottardi and Reka Orsi Toth, earning a shot straight into the round of 12.
They dropped that one to the Verge-Depre sisters, though they put up a fight, losing 16-21, 21-14, 12-15, finishing a career-high ninth and pocketing $7,500 and 600 World Championships points.
The amusing part: Because this is their first solid finish, there will be no rest for Khmil and Davidova. Where will they be next week?
A Futures in Bulgaria.
Calvin Aye, Remi Bassereau are coming into their own
The highest-level match I watched this weekend in Ostrava is, to me, the first-round playoff matchup between France’s Calvin Aye and Remi Bassereau against Andy Benesh and Miles Partain.
Aye is young, just 23 years old, who has played the majority of his professional career with his older brother, Quincy, a towering, funky lefty. Prior to 2025, he hadn’t had much of a chance to showcase what a tremendous athlete he is, 6-foot-5, smooth and jumpy. With Bassereau, a man so athletic he verges on freakish, he has his guy. Sure, they finished 13th, and they’ll begin tournaments in qualifiers for the foreseeable future, but it’s how they played, and how they competed, that was striking. They nearly upset Qatar’s Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan, who are playing arguably the finest ball of their careers, and then they did upset Germany’s Nils Ehlers and Clemens Wickler – we’ll get to them in a moment – and made it look easy: 21-15, 21-16.
That was a team who took second at the Paris Olympics and finished in the top five in nine of 10 tournaments a year ago, with that one finish outside of the top five due only to an ankle injury to Ehlers – and Aye and Bassereau whipped them.
I’ll make the bet that we see them on the podium of at least one Elite16 this season, and nobody will want to see them come World Champs in November.
Clemens Wickler, Nils Ehlers remain winless in 2025
I still can’t really believe I just typed that sentence above.
It makes no sense to me that Clemens Wickler and Nils Ehlers have yet to win a match this season, first dropping both pool play matches in the Brasilia Elite in early April, then dropping both again here in Ostrava.
It’s not difficult to pin down what, exactly, the problem is, as, their sideout percentage has dipped to 58, while their defense is allowing a 67 percent rate. They’re making more errors than their opponents (48 to 43) and getting out-blocked (16 to 22).
It’s the why of it all that’s perplexing.
They are still the same team that has been steadily rising since they began playing together in 2022. Perhaps it is a post-Olympic comedown, an understandable phenomenon that could be impacting a number of other duos who are relatively struggling after Olympic success — see: Duda and Ana Patricia (a ninth, fifth, bronze, and dropped out of Ostrava), David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig (five straight events without a win coming into Ostrava, the longest stretch of their careers, although that has clearly been remedied), Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson (a ninth and two fifths this season). Whatever it is, there is little doubt they will right the ship, and the good news for Germany is that, even with a struggling Ehlers and Wickler, they are as deep as they have ever been.
German federation runs deep
Even with its top two teams struggling in Ostrava, with Nils Ehlers and Clemens Wickler bowing out in pool play and Lukas Pfretszchner and Sven Winter failing to qualify, Germany still put together a notable tournament in Ostrava. The Sagstetters, Benedikt and Jonas, broke pool for the first time in an Elite and did it the convincing way, winning pool with victories over Argentina’s Capogrosso Brothers and James Shaw and Chaim Schalk. It was an important finish, too, as they were on the cusp of pushing out top-10 finishes in the Chennai and Nuvali Challenges from last fall.
Paul Henning and Lui Wust, and Philipp Huster and Maximilian Just, too, were in the main draw, and it’s more than possible that we’ll see five German men’s teams in an Elite main draw at some point this season, making them arguably the deepest men’s federation in the world.
Hendrik Mol, Mathias Berntsen continue steady rise
Steady was a carefully chosen word, as steady was something that has eluded Hendrik and Berntsen for the majority of their careers. At times, they could appear to be one of the best teams in the world and, at times, they could allow five and six point runs and effectively lose a set in three minutes.
That, and I believe this is partly a nod to new head coach Adrian Carambula, has changed. Rare is the occasion now that Hendrik and Berntsen give up a catastrophic run, instead limiting the damage, siding out, and moving on, remaining in the fight. That did them a world of good against Argentina’s Capogrosso Brothers, whom they beat for the first time to break pool. Then they deployed a brilliant, patient gameplan against the Czech Republic’s Jakub Sepka and Jiri Sedlak, who typically channel magic at home in Ostrava, and smacked them 21-13, 21-11 to move on to the round of 12.
Consistency had been a difficult thing for Hendrik and Berntsen to grasp in the past three years, and it is clear, not by their wins, but by their losses, that they have it: Every single loss this season has been decided by three points or less in a set or in three sets. No longer are they their own worst enemy, but a truly steady, consistent enemy to the other side of the net.
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