Doha: Qatar’s hope of snatching a second medal on the penultimate day of the Paris Olympic Games was dashed when Asia’s top beach volleyball duo Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan fell short of a victory in the bronze medal match at the Eiffel Tower Stadium last night.
The Tokyo 2020 bronze winners aimed to make back-to-back appearances on the Olympic podiums. However, it was the Norwegian team of Anders Mol and Christian Sorum who succeeded in winning a medal for a second consecutive time after a strong 2-0 (21-13, 21-16) victory over the Qatari duo.
Mol and Sorum, the gold medalists at the Tokyo Games, outscored the Qatari duo in all elements in the encounter which lasted 36 minutes in front of a packed venue. The second-seeded pair, Mol and Sorum served 4 aces against the Qatari duo while scoring seven block points against Qatar’s three. Younousse and Tijan made four serve errors and 13 attack errors in contrast to five by the Norwegian pair who made all the kill blocks in the match.
The earlier half of the first set was a head-to-head battle until Qatar held up through 9-9. However, Mol and Sorum took the lead scoring three points in a row, and extended the gap until the set was closed with an eight-point lead. In the second set, Younousse and Tijan quickly recovered after a three-point deficit to level the score at 8-8. That too, however, wasn’t enough as their opponents broke away once again as Sorum scored the winning point to cap a memorable victory for Norway.
The Qatari duo had enjoyed a strong run in the Olympic beach volleyball tournament, dominating the group stage and advancing to the semi-finals in which they went down to Sweden’s David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig.
Meanwhile, in the gold medal match which took place later at the same venue, the world No.1 pair of Ahman and Hellvig defeated Germany’s Nils Ehlers and Clemens Wickler in straight sets (21–10, 21–13) to win their country’s first ever medal at Olympics in beach volleyball.
