Monday 11 October 2021
Tournament victory after Olympic disgrace
Beach duo cries after an “unbelievable” coup
It is a completely unexpected victory: Karla Borger and Julia Sude win the final of the World Tour in beach volleyball. Her season is marked by disasters: After her early Olympic exit, she leaves her coach. But then suddenly things only go uphill.
Karla Borger and Julia Sude held their winners’ trophies for a selfie in their cell phone camera in disbelief. The two beach volleyball players did not immediately understand that they had actually won the prestigious final of the World Tour. A good two months after the completely sobering Olympic Games in Tokyo, they landed the greatest success of their careers in Cagliari, Italy. And 150,000 US dollars (just under 130,000 euros) was added as a reward at the end of the season.
“It was a huge honor for us that we qualified here for the World Tour final. And now we are standing here in the sand and have the trophy in our hands. Unbelievable,” said the 32-year-old Borger and wiped the tears from his eyes. The victory at the tournament of the ten best teams in the world was very emotional for the duo from Stuttgart, who compete for DJK TuSA 06 Düsseldorf.
“We had such a tough season,” said Sude, recalling the Olympics in Japan. At the season highlight, the experienced team had big plans, but then failed in the preliminary round. One day after the end, the previous trainer Thomas Kaczmarek had terminated the cooperation. Without a real coach and only supervised by the sports psychologist Nadine Volkmer on site, there was surprisingly bronze at the European Championships in Vienna, silver at the German championships and now the overall victory at the final of the world tour.
“Try not to think too much”
“After the disappointment in Tokyo, we decided to concentrate more on ourselves, to find ourselves together in the sand again,” said 34-year-old Sude. Borrower, who took her gold medal to bed on Sunday and posted it on Twitter, added after the sovereign 2-0 (21:13, 23:21) in the final against the Canadians Sarah Pavan and Melissa Humana-Paredes: “We tried not to think too much. Just keep thinking about the next point.”
That worked perfectly. “They defeated the Olympic and world champions on the way to gold and worked hard for this title at the end of a difficult season,” said President René Hecht of the German Volleyball Association: “An unbelievable success for the team and for German beach volleyball.”
Borger / Sude are the third German women’s duo to have won the gold medal since the competition was launched six years ago. In 2016 and 2017, the Rio Olympic champions Laura Ludwig and Kira Walkenhorst succeeded, in 2019 Ludwig also won with her new partner Margareta Kozuch.