GSTAAD, Switzerland — Zoe Verge-Depre and Esmee Bobner are, by their own admission, “not morning people.”
Yet there they were, sitting at a café in Brasilia, Brazil, at 7:30 in the morning — though in reality their bodies had no Earthly clue what time it was, having just come from Xiamen, China, a swift, 50-plus-hour trip that will leave even the most well-traveled individuals confused and weary — and Verge-Depre, in the throes of the most back-and-forth Olympic race, one in which she was battling her own sister, Anouk, seemed as calm as ever.
She looked at Bobner over her matcha tea and said, unbelievably to her partner, “I found peace in this situation.”
Bobner was at once amused and aghast. Peace? Where on God’s green Earth could Zoe suddenly discover peace?
The only reason they were in Brazil in the first place, competing in another Elite16 qualifier, was because things had gone so south in China that they were essentially forced to get on another plane that wasn’t bound for Switzerland. A ninth-place at the Xiamen Challenge was disappointing enough, the 460 points too low to be usable in the Olympic race. But add onto that Anouk and Joana Mader finishing second, tacking on 760 points to their total, drawing the closest Olympic race even closer, and suddenly Zoe and Bobner found themselves on the side of their court, fresh off a 21-16, 17-21, 11-15 loss to Laura Ludwig and Louisa Lippmann, scrambling for flights that would get them from China to Brazil in time to play a tournament they initially had little intention of playing.
So they boarded another plane, knowing they would have to navigate another gauntlet of a qualifier, on no rest, with bodies wildly out of synch, having gone from Mexico to China to Brazil in as many weeks, while the specter of Anouk and Mader surpassing them loomed ever larger.
“There was no rhythm,” Zoe said. “We were nervous and we had no rhythm and Anouk and Joana took a silver in China so we were following that as well, like ‘OK, shit, there’s more pressure.’ ”
During those bleary-eyed, jetlagged hours when nothing is open and the mind is racing, Zoe scrolled through her phone, watching old videos and a few videos just of nature, “and I said ‘Life is nice. It’s going to be fine. We’re going to play and that’s all we can do,’ ” Zoe said, laughing. “Up to that point I was really stressed and nervous. I went back to my roots.”
They both melt into laughter at that. “Back to my roots.”
It may have been the first time in 15 months they had truly felt peace.
“You have to go through the struggle to find yourself.”
Even when they committed to make a run at the Paris Olympic Games, Zoe and Bobner thought the goal was so audacious they felt silly saying it out loud. Who were they to pass Nina Brunner and Tanja Huberli, 2021 Olympians and two-time European Champs, or Anouk and Mader, bronze medalists at the Tokyo Games and the 2020 European Champs?
“When we set the goal for Paris, it was two years ago, and we were clear about it but to get there was far, and it was hard for us to say it out loud and to say it with confidence,” Zoe said. “It shows how much we had to work on ourselves, to really believe it, to work for it.”
Zoe and Bobner are the rare team in the beach volleyball world that partnered as kids and stayed together. Many federations will take young, developing talent like Zoe, a 26-year-old defender, or Bobner, a 24-year-old blocker, and partner them with a veteran, allowing them to learn and avoid the mistakes, both on and off the court, of youth. Zoe and Bobner never had that veteran presence to teach them, for example, that a shuttle scheduled to leave at 6 p.m. leaves at 6 p.m. and not, say, 6:12 p.m.
“Stupid stuff like this,” Zoe said. “And also on court, if you have an experienced player next to you, you can learn from them and grow a little bit faster and have some of the realizations faster and we had to work on ourselves.”
“You have to go through all of this to know what’s good for yourself,” Bobner added. “You cannot know it by then already. You’re going to go through moments where you make the wrong decision or feel bad about something. I think you have to go through the struggle to find yourself and what player you’re going to be.”
This Olympic race, then, became a baptism by fire, a full-immersion experience that saw them play 26 tournaments in less than two years. And as it went on, those following could not help but notice the plucky young team from Switzerland, growing and developing at the fastest rate of any team in the world. A fourth in April of 2023 at the Itapema Challenge proved no fluke when they grabbed a silver in Jurmala, Latvia, where they beat Anouk and Mader and fell only to world No. 3 Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson in the finals. Another fourth in Edmonton, and a top-10 at the World Championships that October, put Zoe and Bobner in the driver’s seat for the second Swiss spot at the Paris Olympic Games.
Yet the confidence that often comes with results such as those eluded them. It was as if they were waiting for the inevitable, that Anouk and Mader would resume the form that won them an Olympic bronze in 2021, that the veterans would hold off the kids, that the Olympics weren’t an actual, realistic possibility.
“In this whole Olympic race I don’t think we ever felt confident,” Bobner said. “Sure, we did something good, but a lot of other teams did good.”
When sisters become rivals
True enough, every time that Bobner and Zoe played well, it seemed as if Anouk and Mader one-upped them. They qualified at the season-opening Doha Elite16 — but so did Anouk and Mader, who finished four spots above them and passed them, for the first time, in the Olympic standings. Their fifth at the Recife Challenge was matched by Anouk and Joana’s fifth the next week in Saquarema. Their gold in Guadalajara, their first as a team, was all but washed out by Anouk and Mader’s silver the following week in China.
It made for fascinating theater for the outside world but put a wholly unique type of strain on the relationship between Zoe and Anouk, best friends and sisters who were now also chief rivals.
“You don’t wish something bad for them but it’s better that you don’t win and she thought the same for me,” said Zoe, who is six years Anouk’s junior. “It was a weird situation. Nobody’s really had that situation before so I couldn’t go ask how they handled it or get some advice. We tried to figure it out ourselves.”
When one played well, which was virtually every tournament in 2024, “we took a couple days” apart Zoe said, “and then it was normal in our sister relationship.”
How long had they looked up to Brunner and Huberli, Anouk and Mader? How long had Zoe and Bobner, who had never even made a podium at Under-19 and Under-21 events, wanted to become an elite team on the World Tour? It is easy to see why confidence could have eluded them, why the sensation of feeling as if everything could fall apart at any given moment would have been a palpable one. Yet in Brazil, when they were out of rhythm, stressed, pressured even more by Anouk and Joana, they turned a corner. Zoe, for whatever reason, found her peace at that café in Brasilia, and that peace led to another milestone.
Down 17-20 in the second set to Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson in the ninth-place rounds, already Zoe and Bobner had guaranteed themselves a solid finish. They had qualified for the main draw and broke out of pool play, while Anouk and Mader had been eliminated in the qualifier. The 600 points for ninth would be usable in the Olympic race, tacking onto the slim lead they held over Anouk and Mader. To lose to Humana-Paredes and Wilkerson, the four seed against whom they had never so much as won a set, let alone a match, was the expected result.
And yet there were Zoe and Bobner, rattling off three straight points to extend the match, stealing the second set, 25-23, and parlaying that momentum to a 15-10 win in the third.
“We knew we had to just stay in there and be ourselves,” Bobner said. “Against a team like Melissa and Brandie it’s not normal to come back from down match pint. That’s one of the games that gave us confidence.”
They used it well, sweeping Brazil’s Agatha and Rebecca in the quarterfinals, winning bronze with another upset over the Netherlands’ Katja Stam and Raisa Schoon. The 1,000 points they hauled in with that bronze medal were the most of any event they played in the Olympic qualifying period, the final counterpunch needed to stave off Anouk and Mader. Not that they knew it at the time. There were still three events remaining, in Poland, Portugal, and the Czech Republic. Twice, in Portugal and the Czech Republic, they’d whiff on opportunities to knock out Anouk and Mader, but Anouk and Mader would only finish as high as ninth in the three finishing tournaments.
“When we were in Ostrava, on our first match [in the qualifier], we played France and just before that, the Germans played against each other and Laura [Ludwig] and Louisa [Lippmann] won and I saw Louisa just crying her eyes out because the pressure was finally gone,” Bobner said. “I almost started crying because I felt it so much. I really hoped for us to have the same feeling on that day but we lost against Anouk and Joana, and the pressure already flattened out a bit because we had to wait. It was not that high pressure moment.”
Instead of the elation felt by Ludwig and Lippmann, who punched their Olympic ticket by beating Karla Borger and Sandra Ittlinger in the Ostrava Elite16 qualifier, it was a bit strange, how Zoe and Bobner finally realized they’d going to the Olympics. Zoe was cleaning her apartment in Switzerland. Both knew that Friday, June 7 could be the day they found out, but neither wanted to check the results.
And then, around 5 p.m. the message came in.
Zoe Verge-Depre and Esmee Bobner were going to the Paris Olympic Games.
“It was different from what I had in mind when we would qualify,” Zoe said. “The moment was not as cool if it were live and we were together.”
In a way, it’s fitting that it wasn’t how they imagined it, for what, over the course of 15 months, went exactly to plan?
Finding their own way
Zoe has a tattoo that says, simply, “do you.”
If ever there were a custom-fit manner to qualify for an Olympic Games, for a team to “do you,” it is Zoe Verge-Depre and Esmee Bobner.
“It’s easy to look left or right and think you have to do it a certain way but it’s really about finding your way to achieve it,” Zoe said. “Of course there are people with a lot more experience around you and it’s nice to have that and take their advice but you need to transform it. It’s hard to copy so it’s better to understand how you work.”
They understand themselves now, just as they now understand shuttle schedules and planning spontaneous trips from China to Brazil and finding peace somewhere along the jetlagged way. They’ll come into the Paris Olympics not as the plucky young underdogs but as genuine contenders. In the last two weeks, they have won pool at the Gstaad Elite16 and Vienna Elite16. They notched their first career win over world No. 1 Ana Patricia Silva and Duda Lisboa. They won all four matches in which they played against Olympic pairings.
“It felt like we struggled and we could play at a certain level but we didn’t play it constantly,” Bobner said. “Sometimes it is like that, you have the different parts but you cannot put them together. When you finally manage to do so, it comes really fast.”
