Russian pairs sweep gold and silver at FIVB Xiamen Open

In the all-Russian men's final at the 2018 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour Xiamen Open, Oleg Stoyanovskiy/Igor Velichko snatched the gold on Sunday over Viacheslav Krasilnikov/Nikita Liamin, 2-0 (21-18, 21-19).

Stoyanovskiy/Velichko began to team up in 2018 and have securely announced the silver in Doha in March and now the gold in Xiamen. The 21-year-old Stoyanovskiy and 22-year-old Velichko overcame the teammates Krasilnikov/Liamin in a nervous final to seal the two-set victory.

Training together, each team was working to exploit their knowledge of their opponents and Stoyanovskiy/Velichko got ahead in the first set.

In the second, Stoyanovskiy/Velichko had a comfortable lead, but began to lose points in the closing stages, allowing Krasilnikov/Liamin to creep back into the match. Managing to hold their nerve, they finally took the day and their first gold.

"It's really wonderful! It's my first gold medal of the World Tour. It's a very important medal for us because it's only our third tournament," said Stoyanovskiy, "This match against our teammates is very nervous because we know each other very well. We had to be strong enough, coming out with every effort against them."

The bronze medal match is between Brazil's Alison Cerutti/Bruno Oscar Schmidt and Piotr Kantor/Batorsz Losiak from Poland.

Olympic champions Cerutti/Schmidt's best recent result was the bronze at the Porec Major five-star tournament last July and the team took an easy win in Xiamen in 31 minutes defeating the Polish team, 2-0 (21-15, 21-13). The two pairs have encountered for eight times, with the Polish yet to take a win.

"We tried to push ourselves each tournament since the end of last year and the results do not matter. When we finished pushing ourselves as much as possible like we did today, I hope we continue like that. That's going to show how competitive we're going to be this year," said Bruno Schmidt.