A week after being crowned world champions, Alison Cerutti and Bruno Oscar Schmidt of Brazil validated their gold medal performance in the Netherlands by topping the podium at the Gstaad Major, the last Swatch Major Series event on the 2015 FIVB World Tour calendar.
For a 15th straight year the picturesque Swiss village of Gstaad has hosted beach volleyball’s crème de la crème. Holding the largest collection of gold medals from one of the Tour’s emblematic locations, Brazil enjoyed another glorious weekend thanks to the supreme form of Alison-Bruno. In a dream final on Sunday, featuring the newly promoted world champions and the reigning World Tour winners, the Brazilians prevailed over Latvia’s Samoilovs-Smedins in three sets (21–16, 13–21, 15–10). Albeit less dramatic than the legendary final last week in The Hague, the gold medal encounter in Switzerland, for the first time with two events in a season after the Lucerne Open was held earlier this year, offered a battle full of great physical skills and intense rallies.
The win secured a spot for Alison and Bruno in a very prestigious list of world champions who have managed to win the following World Tour event and thus validate their international supremacy. Germany’s Brink-Reckermann were the last champions to achieve that in 2009 when they won the very same event in Gstaad after grabbing the title at the World Championship in Stavanger, Norway.
The back-to-back World Tour winners Samoilovs-Smedins could be happy despite the defeat in the final. It was only the third FIVB tournament the two Latvians have played together in 2015 due to Janis Smedins’s right knee injury that prevented him also from the participating at the World Championship in Holland. There Aleksandrs Samoilovs teamed up with Martins Plavins. At the Lucerne Open and at the Moscow Grand Slam Samoilovs-Smedins finished 9th, so the runner-up position in Gstaad is an incentive for the Latvians and for their opponents that they would still fight for points despite the problematic season.
We saw familiar faces in the match for the bronze medals as well. The 2013 world champions Brouwer-Meeuwsen from the Netherlands, winners of the Porec Major in Croatia a month ago, stepped on the podium for the fourth time this season as they defeated the discovery of 2015, the Italian duo Ranghieri-Carambula, in three sets (18-21, 21-16, 15-10). The Italians still lack points in the world ranking, so they had to start once more from the qualification rounds in order to be granted a quota in the Main Draw. Ranghieri-Carambula, seeded 29th, defeated Russia’s Semenov-Krasilnikov and USA’s Hyden-Bourne in the preliminary Pool D, and went on to cruise past Poland’s Losiak-Kantor and Kadziola-Szalankiewicz, as well as Canada’s Binstock-Schachter to find a place in the semifinals. Alison-Bruno, who did not enjoy a perfect record in Gstaad as they finished second in the preliminary Pool C behind Fijalek-Prudel, had no problems with Adrian Carambula’s sky serves and easily paved their way to the next pair of gold medals.
It was a disappointing week for the top-seeded world vice-champions Nummerdor-Varenhorst from Holland who were not only shattered by the Canadians Schalk-Saxton in Pool A, but left the tournament in Round 1 early on Saturday due to a 1-2 defeat against compatriots Brouwer-Meeuwsen (16-21, 21-16, 13-15).
The World Tour takes a break for a week now so that teams can accommodate in Japan for the tournament next week. Yokohama will host the second Grand Slam of the year and will mark the return of the Asian country as an FIVB organizer for the first time since 1991.
