Lausanne, Switzerland, April 30, 2018 – Taliqua Clancy and Mariafe Artacho del Solar will be aiming to continue a strong run of form over the past few months and confirm their status as number one seeds when the Mersin 3-Star tournament begins on Wednesday.
The tournament on Turkey’s southern coast will be the sixth time that Turkey has hosted an FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour event and a seventh will take place in Alanya later in the year.
Clancy, 25, and Artacho del Solar, 24, have only been playing together since the start of October, but they have already notched up a number of successes. They began by winning gold on the Asian Beach Tour in Osaka, and then won another gold at the Qinzhou 3-Star event in China a week later.
Most recently they returned to China and won bronze at the Xiamen 4-Star tournament, and twice they have shown their home crowd the type of form they can hit when they play their best.
In November they won gold at the Sydney 2-Star tournament on Manly beach, and then won silver at the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games in front of 4,000 spectators.
Qatar’s Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan top the seeding in the men’s tournament, and like their women’s counterparts they too are in the early stages of their partnership having paired up in October 2017.
Their most notable success on the World Tour came on home sand in March, when they finished third at the Katara Beach Volleyball Cup in Doha. Their only World Tour appearance since then was in Xiamen where they left with a 17th-place finish.
Also in the men’s draw are Cuba’s Diaz Nivaldo and Sergio Gonzalez. The pair made a huge impact at the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympic Games where they reached the quarterfinals, despite not having appeared on the World Tour, except for the Netherlands 2017 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championships.
Following their success in 2016 they have played in nine World Tour tournaments and won gold at the 2017 Langkawi 1-Star tournament and bronze at the 2017 Qinzhou tournament.
In Mersin they are seeded third, behind number two seeds Dries Koekelkoren and Tom van Walle from Belgium.
