Hamburg, Germany, August 12, 2018 – Seven of the ten men’s teams competing at the Beach Volleyball FIVB World Tour Finals presented by Vodafone in Hamburg this week have enjoyed the feeling of topping the podium in a World Tour event in the 2017-2018 season, but none of them has done it as much as Alexander Brouwer and Robert Meeuwsen of the Netherlands.
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The Dutch duo has won as many as three international tournaments this season, the most for any tandem competing in the World Tour. Brouwer, 28, and Meeuwsen, 30, the bronze medalists of the Rio 2016 Olympics, have played in 12 events since January.
This is already the most prolific season for the Europeans, who have been together since 2011 and prevailed in the 2015 edition of the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championships.
Their first gold came in March, when they prevailed in the four-star tournament in Doha, Qatar. The next week, they returned home and topped the podium again, now in the one-star event in Aalsmeer, the Netherlands. Their most recent victory happened in May, in another four-star tournament in Huntington Beach, USA.
The Dutch players' successful international season was also highlighted by the gold medal they won in the European Masters event in Pelhrimov, Czech Republic, in January. They also celebrated a victory in the Swiss Tour as they won the tournament played in Zurich in April.
Much of their success can be explained by the chemistry they developed over the eight seasons they have been playing together. With 78 tournaments under their belts, Brouwer and Meeuwsen are the second most long-lasting team competing in Hamburg, just behind Spain’s Pablo Herrera and Adrian Gavira, who have shared the court for 102 events.
The other men's teams competing at the Rothenbaum are Norway’s Anders Mol/Christian Sørum (15 tournaments together), Poland’s Piotr Kantor/Bartosz Losiak (77) and Grzegorz Fijalek/Michal Bryl (17), Latvia’s Aleksandrs Samoilovs/Janis Smedins (68) and Martins Plavins/Edgars Tocs (12), Italy’s Daniele Lupo/Paolo Nicolai (74), Russia’s Oleg Stoyanovskiy/Igor Velichko (9) and Germany’s Clemens Wickler/Julius Thole (12).