D’Artagnan Potts & Jack Pearse produced the first Australian victory (Photo UCI)
D’Artagnan Potts-Jack Pearse produced the first Australian victory at the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championships to delight the home crowd in Adelaide on the opening day of the sport’s premier event.
Seeded 40th in the 48-team men’s draw, Potts-Pearse stunned ninth-seeded Chaim Schalk-James Shaw of the United States in their Pool I match.
At the end of the day, another Aussie duo, Mark Nicolaidis-Izac Carracher, brought more joy to the home fans with an emphatic 21-11, 21-12 shutout of Morocco’s Ilyas Rhouni Lazaar-Soufiane El Gharouti.
In a dramatic course of events, Potts-Pearse recovered from losing the first set of their opening game and won both of the next two sets in the overtime to celebrate a 2-1 (16-21, 24-22, 17-15) victory, after several Australian setbacks in both the men’s and the women’s tournaments earlier in the day.
The first three-set match of the women’s competition unfolded in a Pool G fixture. In a duel between two Paris 2024 Olympian teams, Spain’s Daniela Alvarez-Tania Moreno came back from a set down against Lithuania’s Monika Paulikiene-Aine Raupelyte to celebrate a 2-1 (12-21, 21-19, 15-12) victory. The same court staged all women’s tie-breaker matches that followed on opening day in Adelaide.
Tania led the way to success with an impressive 28 points for the winners, while Dani scored all of the duo’s two aces and two kill blocks to finish with 10 points. Raupelyte powered the Lithuanian side with seven kill blocks and three aces towards a team-high 25 points, while Paulikiene put away another 19, including two aces.
Two years after winning gold at the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championship with Sara Hughes and taking the United States back to the top of the podium after 14 years, Kelly Cheng returned to the tournament on a high.
The two-time Olympian played with new partner Molly Shaw on the first day of matches in Adelaide and frustrated the home fans by taking down one of the five Australian teams that compete for a medal, beating Jasmine Fleming and Stefanie Fejes 2-0 (21-19, 21-18).
Cheng, 30, is making her fifth World Championship appearance this week in Adelaide – before winning gold in Tlaxcala two years ago, she was ninth in Vienna, in 2017, and Hamburg, in 2019, and 17th in Rome, in 2022. Her partner since the start of the 2025 season, the 29-year-old Shaw is competing among the top teams on the planet for the first time in her career.
Looking to win their third Beach Volleyball World Championship medal together in Australia, Norwegian superstars Anders Mol and Christian Sørum had a solid debut in the 2025 edition of the tournament.
The Beach Volley Vikings were faced with Uruguayans Hans Hannibal and Nicolás Llambías in one of the very first matches of the event held in Adelaide, and used their larger experience at the highest level to debut with a promising 2-0 (21-17, 21-16) victory.
Making their fourth appearance at the World Championship, the Tokyo 2020 Olympic champions made the trip to Australia determined to return to the podium after going down in the quarterfinals in the last edition of the event, in 2023. The Norwegians won medals in their first two times competing at the World Championship, taking bronze in Hamburg in 2019 and winning gold in Rome three years later.
