The Peninsula
Italy’s Marta Menegatti and Valentina Gottardi and Qatar’s Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan lead the women’s and the men’s entry lists for the first of two Dubai Challenge events on the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour next month.
The eighth Challenge tournament of the inaugural Beach Pro Tour season will take place from October 22 to 25.
A total of 96 pairs will compete for their share of the USD 150,000 prize purse. In each gender, 16 teams were seeded directly into the 24-team main draw line-up. The remaining eight vacancies will be contested in a 32-team qualification bracket.
A second tournament of the same category will be held in Dubai from October 27 through 30. The United Arab Emirates have not hosted an event of such a high calibre since 2008 when the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour visited the Asian country for the first time with a two-gender Dubai Open tournament.
Teams from 25 countries and all five continental confederations are among the 48 that appear on the men’s main draw and qualifier lists. Former world’s number one Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan, currently eighth in the World Ranking, will be the top-seeded team in the men’s main draw.
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic bronze medallists have already collected gold and silver at the highest Elite16 level but will be chasing their first podium at the Challenge level.
Second, on the entry list are Norway’s Mathias Berntsen and Hendrik Mol. After finishing Agadir Challenge runners-up in July, they will be aiming at their second Beach Pro Tour podium.
Among the world’s highest-ranked teams are also Italy’s Adrian Carambula and Enrico Rossi, Argentina’s Nicolas Capogrosso and Tomas Capogrosso, and Switzerland’s Quentin Metral and Yves Haussener.