Anastasia Samoilova and Tina Graudiņa | Photo: IMAGO/Beautiful Sports
Tīna Graudiņa and Anastasija Samoilova, the representatives of Latvia’s leading beach volleyball women’s pair, shared their thoughts about the upcoming season in a conversation with “Latvijas Televīzija”, and also revealed that they plan to qualify for the Paris Olympic Games through the ranking.
“It was a very good training camp because we prepared to play outside, it took two or three days to prove ourselves playing outside,” says Graudiņa after returning from Tenerife. “Now, when we go to the next training camp, the adaptation process will not be so long. We will be able to go straight ielec in the process and make the most of it every day. We are excited that we will be participating in the finals of the Beach Pro Tour, it will be our first World Tour Finals. Getting there is already a success, but we will fight for the top places. This tournament is perhaps not so important in terms of ranking, because I will not give any points for it, but in terms of prestige, it is quite important,” says the volleyball player.
“We are definitely aiming to qualify [Parīzes OS] through rank, that would be the safest way. We look at the Continental Cup as a backup option, hopefully it won’t come to that and we won’t have to put all our cards on it. The year will be difficult, because you have to participate in 12 competitions in order for your opportunity to participate in the Olympics to be considered at all. It won’t be easy,” Graudiņa said.
“It is also important that there are many strong European teams in Tenerife with whom we can train and play together, that is also a big advantage. Because here [Latvijā] we train individually. The training process is at a high level, methods have appeared that we can use,” says Samoilova.
“It will be very nice to play there, to be among the top ten pairs. This will also benefit our preparation process before participating in the OS qualifiers. We will be able to see what work we have done. I agreed that ranking is more important and we are already planning which tournaments we will go to. The year will be stressful, we will try to show the best result everywhere,” said the confident volleyball player.
