The 2020 Beach Major Series season will start 1,000 meters above sea level as the picturesque Swiss Alps village of Gstaad will host a beach volleyball tournament for the 21st-straight season. The last two editions saw the same men’s team, the one of Norwegian stars Anders Mol and Christian Sørum, take the cowbells home, but the women’s event has had a different winner in each of the last four seasons, including the reigning champions, Americans April Ross and Alix Klineman.
Four days after the Tokyo Olympic champions are determined the best players on the planet will be in Vienna, for the second Major of the season. The Austrian capital joined the calendar for the first time in 2017, when it hosted the World Championships, and it has quickly become one of the premiere stages for the sport with its majestic setup at the Danube Island. Mol and Sørum will be looking for a hat-trick here too as they won both the 2018 and 2019 editions while Canadian world champions Sarah Pavan and Melissa Humana-Paredes will defend their title among the women.
The season will come to an end at the iconic Rothenbaum stadium in Hamburg. The German city will host a Major event for the first time since 2016 but it has turned into a staple in the international calendar over the last three years by hosting the World Tour Finals in both 2017 and 2018 and the World Championships in 2019, which saw Pavan/Humana-Paredes and Russians Oleg Stoyanovskiy and Viacheslav Krasilnikov claim gold and book their places at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
"The Beach Majors are something special," says Hannes Jagerhofer, CEO of the Beach Major Series. "If you consider that the tournaments in Gstaad, Hamburg, and Vienna in 2019 counted almost 300,000 visitors, it gives you goosebumps. The Nielsen study from Vienna, which found that 67 percent of visitors associate their most outstanding event experience with visiting our tournament, shows the importance of what we do. I am very thankful that we were allowed to create something like this! "
