Anders Mol and Christian Sørum had to wait for more than a year, but they got their revenge against Oleg Stoyanovskiy and Viacheslav Krasilnikov. Exactly 388 days after being knocked out of last year’s World Tour Finals by the Russians, the Beach Volley Vikings took the first opportunity they had to get back on the reigning world champions and won their third-straight European title on Sunday.
Playing at the Latvian coastal city of Jurmala, the Norwegians had a dominant performance all-week long, winning all of the six matches they playing without dropping sets. Their final and most important triumph was the gold medal match’s 21-19, 21-15 against Stoyanovskiy and Krasilnikov, which was also their 20th-straight victory in European Championship matches.
“It’s so amazing,” Mol, who had six block points in the final, reflected after the match. “It’s been a tough year with very few tournaments and we were very happy and grateful just to be here playing at the European Championships. To win three times in a row, it’s one of those things that will take a while for us to really understand what it means.”
Mol and Sørum have now joined a very limited group of teams that won three European titles in a row. The list includes Swiss brothers Paul and Martin Laciga, who won three straight between 1998 and 2000, and Dutch Richard Schuil and Reinder Nummerdor, who secured their hat-trick a decade later, from 2008 to 2010.
Italians Daniele Lupo and Paolo Nicolai, who are also three-time European champions, having won the tournament in 2014, 2016 and 2017, finished with the bronze medal after they downed Russians Nikita Liamin and Taras Myskiv in the three-set (17-21, 23-21, 15-12) third-place match.
“We didn’t have a lot of opportunities to play this year, so it means a lot to get a medal here,” Nicolai explained. “It’s a nice result to carry for the next year, when we’ll play at the Tokyo Olympics.”
