Beach volleyball players Nils Ehlers and Clemens Wickler won their first game at the World Championships in Rome.
Beach volleyball players Nils Ehlers and Clemens Wickler won their first game at the World Championships in Rome.
The duo from Hamburg won Group J against Hans Hannibal and Marco Cairus from Uruguay in 2:1 sets (19:21, 21:17, 15:8). Ehlers and Wickler are the only German men’s team that has qualified for the World Cup.
Of the four German women’s pairs, only the Stuttgart women’s Chantal Laboreur and Sarah Schulz had lost their first game the day before. Karla Borger/Julia Sude, also from Stuttgart, as well as Sandra Ittlinger/Isabel Schneider and Svenja Müller/Cinja Tillmann, who train in Hamburg, were successful in their respective groups.
Ehlers and Wickler have only been playing together since this season. In 2019, the 27-year-old Wickler had finished second with Julius Thole (25) at the World Championships in Hamburg and was in the quarterfinals of the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Thole retired last October to focus on his law studies. Wickler met the 2.11 meter tall Ehlers. Most recently, the Hamburg team came fifth in the Elite 16 tournament, the highest category in the Beach Pro Tour, in Jurmala, Latvia.
At the World Championships in Rome, 48 men’s and women’s duos will play for the title. They are divided into 12 groups of four teams each. The groups first and second as well as the four best group thirds qualify directly for the knockout stage. The eight other third-placed teams play in a lucky-loser round for the last four places in the knockout stage, which is made up of 32 teams for both men and women. All five German couples are in action on Sunday.