Beach Pro Tour digs deeper into Oceania

With Tahiti hosting a Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour Futures event last week, French Polynesia became the fifth member of the Oceania Zonal Volleyball Association (OZVA) to organize a world-level beach volleyball tournament.

Along with traditional host Australia, which welcomed the Beach Pro Tour as many as three times last year and held this season’s second Futures event in Coolangatta less than two weeks ago, the other Oceania countries to have played host to world-level beach volleyball competitions are the Cook Islands, Guam, New Zealand and, as of last week, French Polynesia.

International beach volleyball’s first event in Oceania, beyond Australia, occurred in 2020, when the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour had 1-star stops in the Cook Islands with a men’s tournament in January and in Guam with a women’s event in March.

In March and April, 2022, Coolangatta in Australia hosted a men’s and women’s event to become the first-ever venue for a Futures tournament on the new Beach Pro Tour. In November and December, Torquay, also in Australia, became the first venue to welcome both a Challenge and Elite16 tournament in two consecutive weeks. Coolangatta organised another successful Futures event in March and April of this year, shortly after New Zealand welcomed its first world-level event, a men’s and women’s Futures tournament in Mount Maunganui Beach.

17 men’s duos from nine different countries took part in last week’s Tahiti Futures. French Polynesia was represented by two pairs of local Tahitian players (pictured above; photo credit: Jean-Marc Monnier, ladepeche.pf) - Raihau Mare and Jeremie Paraue, and Christophe Ariitai and Hevanoa Vaki – four local indoor volleyball stars, who took advantage of the rare opportunity to make their Beach Pro Tour debuts and test their skills on the sand against some high-level international opponents.

The Tahiti Futures podium

Fifth-seeded Italians Tiziano Andreatta and Andrea Abbiati cruised through the tournament without dropping a single set and triumphed on top of the podium to claim their first Beach Pro Tour medal. They had previously earned one gold and two bronze medals on the World Tour.

In Saturday’s final, Andreatta and Abbiati mastered a 2-0 (21-13, 21-13) shutout of third-seeded Kensuke Shoji and Jumpei Ikeda of Japan, for whom the silver medal earned was the team’s first piece of hardware from a world-level tournament. So was the Tahiti bronze for second-seeded Germans Simon Kulzer and Bennet Poniewaz, who had finished fourth the previous week in Coolangatta. In the third place match, they celebrated a 2-0 (21-16, 21-14) victory over the USA’s Jake Urrutia and Ian Satterfield.

Beach Pro Tour 2023 full event schedule