Pro Beach
August 9, 2024
There was only one element missing from Duda Lisboa’s resume.
She’d won a World Championship. Won a Gstaad cowbell. Won every accolade there was to win — Rookie, Server, Most Outstanding, Best Team. All of them.
Even when she was just a teenager, playing in an era that included prime April Ross and just-out-of-her-prime Laura Ludwig, she was voted by her peers at the best player in the world, in both 2018 and 2019 and again in 2023.
Yet she hadn’t won an Olympic gold.
No Brazilian female, in fact, had claimed an Olympic gold medal since Sandra Piles and Jackie Silva did so in 1996, winning an all-Brazilian final.
Duda wasn’t even born.
It is fitting, then, that the first Brazilian Olympic gold medal of her lifetime has been won by her and Ana Patricia Silva, beating Canadians Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson on Friday evening in Paris, 26-24, 12-21, 15-9.
Only Ana Patricia, Duda’s best friend and longtime partner, has been able to match the torrid pace of the 26-year-old Brazilian defender. When they were kids, they were world-beaters. If there was a tournament to win, they won it. Won the youth Olympics exactly 10 years ago in Nanjing, China. Won the Under 21 World Championships two years after that. And again the year after that.
They split for an Olympic quad, Duda turning to one of the best to ever play the game in Agatha Bednarczuk, Ana Patricia to Rebecca Cavalcanti. They both qualified for the Tokyo Games but, in spite of winning a combined 25 medals in the process, neither made the podium in the Olympics.
For a stretch, it seemed Paris may have portended a similar outcome.
They were the most decorated team of the three-year stretch between the Games, winning nine golds, including the 2022 World Championships in Rome. Yet 2024 provided an uncharacteristic lapse in medals. Since partnering back up in 2022, they hadn’t gone a stretch of three tournaments without a podium a single time — until the three events leading into Paris, which featured a fifth in Espinho, fourth in Ostrava, ninth in Gstaad. That ninth was their worst finish in a tournament in two years, dating back to the 2022 Ostrava Elite16.
Perhaps that’s what ignited their dominant run through Paris. Perhaps it was a simple regression to the mean. In any event, what happened next was vintage Duda and Ana Patricia: five straight sweeps to earn a berth into the medal rounds. An excellent three-set semifinal win over Australia’s Mariafe Artacho and Taliqua Clancy (20-22, 21-15, 15-12) to put them into a final against a Canadian team on its third life.
A Canadian team that had previously beaten Ana Patricia and Duda in Doha in the first tournament of the season.
Humana-Paredes had gone on a podcast prior to that season-opening event, and she was asked which team she considered her biggest rivals.
“It was them,” she said of Ana Patricia and Duda, “because they were the only team we hadn’t beaten. We went in with a little bit of gusto and we wanted that.”
They came out with gusto in the gold medal match, too, establishing an 8-2 lead in the opening set, saving their best beach volleyball of the Olympic Games for when it mattered most. Yet one does not become the world No. 1 on accident, and soon the world No. 1 form of Ana Patricia and Duda descended upon Eiffel Tower Stadium.
Ana Patricia header digs. Duda bombs into the angle. Ana Patricia blocks. Duda digs and transition kills.
The Canadian lead disappeared in a cloud of Brazilian defensive artwork, and 24 points after going down six, it was all tied at 17-17.
The fact that Humana-Paredes and Wilkerson recovered enough to earn a set point is a testament to their mental resolve. It wasn’t enough. Not in the first set, anyway, as Ana Patricia and Duda closed a spectacular comeback, 26-24.
Tortured genius is a phrase Rich Lambourne often uses when describing Ana Patricia and Duda. When they are at their best, no team in the world can stop them. Any evidence one might need can be found in the finals of the Brasilia Elite16, in which, try as Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth might, they couldn’t touch the Brazilians.
Yet on occasion, that unstoppable force is halted not by the cliched immovable object, but themselves. The second set was a display of the mercurial side of Ana Patricia and Duda, a 12-21 head-scratcher that sent the final into three sets for the first time in women’s Olympic beach volleyball history.
Which version of Ana Patricia and Duda would come out of the box? The World Champs or the ones who were mopped up in the second set?
In front of a vocal sea of Brazilian fans, singing and chanting and waving their flags, it was the former. They jumped out to a 10-5 lead and held fast as Wilkerson and Humana-Paredes attempted to mount a comeback. Following an ace from Wilkerson and a swing from Ana Patricia, both of whom celebrated with no desire to hide their emotion, the blockers jawed at each other through the net, needing to be separated by a cadre of referees.
It was Olympic beach volleyball at its finest, two of the best blockers in the world attempting to sway the most important match of their careers in any way they could.
But at the day’s end, Brazil has something no other federation can claim.
It has a Duda.
Yes, it was Ana Patricia who delivered the final blow, a swing off the hands of Wilkerson to clinch the gold medal. But it has been — and always will be — Duda who has been the rock of this team, this federation, this beach volleyball world, since they were kids in Nanjing, China.
Ten years later, it’s no youth Olympic gold medal they’ll be taking home, but the real deal.
The long-awaited gold medal of Duda Lisboa, Ana Patricia Silva, and a Brazilian fanbase who will be singing and dancing and waving their flags until the sun goes down and back up again, perhaps until the next Olympic quad begins, and it’s time to do it all over again.
Brandie Wilkerson, Melissa Humana-Paredes make Canadian Olympic history
As far as making history goes, Brandie Wilkerson and Melissa Humana-Paredes had already done that prior to Friday’s gold medal match. In coming back to beat Switzerland’s Nina Brunner and Tanja Huberli in Thursday’s semifinal, they guaranteed themselves a medal — the first ever for a Canadian women’s beach team, and first overall since 1996, when John Child and Mark Heese won bronze in Atlanta.
It will be a silver, their third such medal this season, adding onto silvers in Doha and Ostrava.
Nina Brunner, Tanja Huberli win second straight Swiss Olympic bronze
The words of Anouk Verge-Depre, following her and Joana Mader’s Olympic bronze medal in Tokyo, have been forever etched into beach volleyball lore. Asked, after their win over Tina Graudina and Anastasija Samoilova to clinch the first Swiss Olympic beach volleyball medal in history, if Switzerland was now a beach volleyball country she confirmed that yes, yes it is.
In the wake of a remarkably successful Paris Olympic Games for Switzerland, it is impossible to argue anything else.
Nina Brunner and Tanja Huberli tacked on another bronze medal for Switzerland on Friday evening, sweeping Australia’s Taliqua Clancy and Mariafe Artacho, 21-17, 21-15. It’s the first Olympic medal for Brunner and Huberli, two-time European Champs who competed in their second Olympic Games.
