GSTAAD, Switzerland – Tina Graudina has an uncanny knack for success in Gstaad. In seven tournaments at the Beach Pro Tour’s most coveted stop, she has made the semifinals four times. Sunday’s appearance in the semis and then finals seemed as unlikely as ever. She and Anastasija Samoilova were coming off a fifth at a Futures event at home in Jurmala and were summarily dismissed in the second round of pool play here in Gstaad by Terese Cannon and Megan Kraft.
Yet there they were, winning two playoff matches in three sets, including a take-down of Canadians Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson, extending their run into Sunday yet again.
“Why wouldn’t we want to play some extra games,” she said, “in this beautiful place?”
Tina Graudina/Volleyball World photo
“This place is something special”
Gstaad is not real. It is a fake place lifted out of fairytales and fables. When you walk through the mountain trails, you expect, at any moment, to see Frodo and Sam pop out from the bushes and invite you on a merry adventure. Mary and Pippin will be waiting for you with foamy pints at the local watering hole when you return to share stories and get into some clean-cut mischief. The sound of distant thunder deep in the mountains might not be thunder at all, but Smaug lording over his treasure with a righteous fury.
As you pass alpacas and goats and cows and horses both big and small on your way down the trail, you anticipate a throaty good morning from the animals, because this place seems as likely as any for Aslan to have breathed life and human intelligence into its creatures.
Gstaad is the Shire. It is Narnia.
It cannot be real.
A growing theory of mine about which I am only half-joking is that Gstaad is where God initially carved his Garden of Eden, that bucolic setting where the Almighty alas sat down, rested after his six days of work, and sighed with a celestial satisfaction that his work was Good. If that were the case, it is easy to see why he’d be so wrathful with Adam and Eve, for how could anyone in their right mind throw away the chance to live here in perpetuity?
Anything else, in comparison, would indeed seem like a hell, relatively speaking, for there is no evil here. No imperfections. Every rock, every blade of grass, every mountain stream, seems personally crafted and placed with an intelligent intention that cannot be explained.
It has that effect, too, of something bigger. Gstaad marks the midpoint of the beach volleyball season, a time in which players are beginning to wear down, for injuries both physical and mental to begin adding up, one ache, one jet-lagged, tossing-and-turning night at a time. Nick Lucena knew this well. He’s an emotional man, one to feel the euphoric highs of wins and the devastating gut punches of losses with all their weight. He’d miss his wife. Miss his kids.
Then he’d go to Gstaad.
When he left, he’d feel renewed, the sins of the first six months of the season washed away in the Saane River.
The only place I’ve seen that comes close to possessing the majesty and breathtaking beauty of Gstaad is Yosemite. Similar as they are, they are also as different as the sun and the moon. Yosemite is wild, roguish, where the brutality of nature continues in its vicious yet perfect cycle, everything remaining in balance, policed and enforced by the laws of nature.
Gstaad is refined, a bastion of wealth, fine chocolate, handcrafted watches and that pleasant Swiss neutrality. It is well-groomed, clean. You cannot imagine an act of violence being committed here. You might find John Galt and his peers in the valley, having shrugged off the weight of the world to rebuild it again for the elites.
And it is, make no mistake, a place for the elite.
To live in Gstaad is to command a most extravagant salary. To buy a home here is possible only to the rare few. Yet Gstaad is somehow able to pull off a curious feat: Elegant and luxurious as it may be, wealth vibrating from its every leaf, it does not suffer the fate of the uber-rich. There is no arrogance here, no highbrow patronizing, no boasting. It is, somehow, as humble and relatable as any mountain town you might find in Appalachia.
This is nothing shy of extraordinary.
All week, I puzzled over this conundrum, for it did not seem possible. But as I walked through the Paris airport, my mind turned over and inspected the inventory of all of the small and seemingly insignificant interactions I had this week.
It was in those little conversations that the true nature of this place revealed itself.
The people here do not want to simply show off their wealth and the awesome beauty of their town – they want to share it.
Whenever a player was given a microphone this week, they would invariably find a way, when the opportunity presented itself, to sidestep a question and instead make sure to take the time to thank the crowd for welcoming them, for cheering them on as if they were one of their own. Just listen to Cherif Younousse, after capturing his first gold medal here. He spoke not of his own game, of the triumph of winning his first Elite in three years, of capturing the most elusive prize on beach volleyball’s annual calendar, but of the people.
“You guys make us feel at home here,” he said. “And not just today, or last month, but ever since we came here in 2021, whether we are playing the best team in the world against Norway, against Brazil, you guys support us. Thank you.”
A pair of west Africans representing Qatar, being treated like Swiss.
Volleyball World photo
This ethos stretched down the road, to neighboring Saanen, and up the mountain. It is the front-desk worker at the Gstaaderhof, who saw Kristen Nuss and Taryn Brasher walk in and had their keys ready for them. She remembered them from a year ago – names, room numbers and all.
It is in Ines, a lovely young woman who worked at the Alpenrose Hotel, who took Kyle Friend’s coffee order – cappuccino with oat milk – on day one and had it ready for him every morning before he asked. It is in Angelo, a waiter at the hotel restaurant who, seeing as Kyle wasn’t joining me for dinner on the last night, joined me himself, and we talked the magic of this place. Initially from Italy, Angelo works at the Alpenrose in the summers, living in the hotel basement.
“Does it ever get old?” I asked him, motioning to the view.
He shook his head and his gaze followed my hand, which I had motioned over the balcony, where the towering, impossibly green alps, flecked with snow at the top, stood sentinel, calm and mighty as a Buddha.
What more needed to be said?
“This place is just something special,” Nuss said after winning a gold medal of her own. “So magical.”
It is beach volleyball’s Majestic Major.
