If you don’t want to know the volleyball result look away now.
I said look away now.
Come on now.
The FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour touching down in Rome.
In the women’s competition, Talita Antunes and Taiana Lima claimed their third gold medal.
The Brazilians beat the US pair of Jennifer Kessy and April Ross 21-17, 19-21, 15-12, adding to their victories in The Hague and Shanghai Grand Slams.
Talita and Lima dominated the first set and carried that form into the second.
However, midway through the second the US pair called a time-out and from then on they worked their way back into the match.
The Brazilians took the initiative early in the tie-break, though, and while Kessy and Ross saved three match points, a Lima drop-shot won the contest.
For the men, Sean Rosenthal and Phil Dalhausser won their first gold medals when they held off the challenge of Janis Smedins and Aleksandrs Samoilovs.
The US pair beat the Latvians 21-19, 21-18 to earn Rosenthal his second consecutive gold medal in Rome, a year after he and Jacob Gibb had topped the podium.
The pair only teamed up at the start of the year and while they won the season opening Fuzhou Open, they’d not been able to find their way back to the podium in subsequent tournaments.
With Samoilovs and Smedins having enjoyed a gold and silver on the World Tour this year, they made life difficult, but the combination of Dalhausser’s prowess at the net and Rosenthal’s athleticism behind was enough to send them into the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championships in a week’s time in confident mood.
