DOHA, Qatar — It was an awfully strange time for Kristen Nuss to, perhaps for the first documented time on a beach volleyball court, get lazy.
Nuss and Taryn Kloth were leading Terese Cannon and Megan Kraft, 19-17, in the second set of the Beach Pro Tour Finals gold medal match after having already won the first. They were two points shy of becoming the first repeat champions of the event since Germans Laura Ludwig and Kira Walkenhorst took gold in 2016 and 2017. And yet, there was Nuss, digging a high line shot and, rather than pop up and begin her approach for a transition swing as she has done hundreds of times this season, she just sort of laid there.
The previous touch had been purely Nussian, an all-out sprint to dig a Cannon high line. It was a dig only few in the world can make, and not only did Nuss scoop the shot with an all-out dive, her chest and face clouded in a plume of sand, the ball landed directly into the platform of Kloth, who had at that point been putting on a clinic in transition setting. She could put Nuss in an excellent position to score, to go up three match points for the biggest prize purse of the year, one where gold comes not only with the title of Beach Pro Tour Finals champions, but $150,000.
Well, Kloth could put Nuss in a position to score, anyway, if Nuss would ever get her behind off the ground.
Instead, she lay there on her back for a moment, apparently enjoying the view, a brief respite in a season that has been a full-throttle sprint since December. But then Nuss saw something that galvanized her a bit: Kloth wasn’t lobbing the ball back over the net as she expected.
She was setting it.
Why would she do that?
Kloth was wondering the same about Nuss: Why was she still on the ground?
Nuss, see, thought Kloth had touched the high line shot, meaning Kloth would have had to send the ball over to Cannon and Kraft. Nuss would then be in no particular hurry to approach and attack a ball. So when she saw Kloth forming a platform and angling her body to set, up popped Nuss, quick as a hiccup, and soon her feet were pitter-pattering into an approach as only hers can, jumping awkwardly off her left foot, seeing the slimmest possibility to chop a cut shot from well off the net that might, should the universe smile down upon her just so on Saturday in Doha, go down for a kill.
“It was going to be glorious or an error,” Nuss said afterward, laughing.
Oh, it was glorious all right, the shot of the tournament, not only for the comical difficulty and absurdity of it, but also the timing. That kill put the match out of reach. A 20-17 lead would prove insurmountable, and Nuss and Kloth would close it, on the following play, 21-19, 21-17.
Saturday’s Finals marked the end of maybe the most bittersweet Olympic quad the United States has ever had. It provided the final exclamation point in the final chapter in what was an American tour de force from 2022-2024. Three straight seasons have ended with a Finals gold medal returning home to the USA. For the first time since 2009, the World Championship was also claimed by an American pair when Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes toppled Brazil’s Ana Patricia Silva and Duda Lisboa in Tlaxcala, Mexico.
Every major title, and most non-major ones, too are currently owned by the USA, save for one: an Olympic gold, or even a medal at all.
Paris marked the first time since the advent of beach volleyball as an Olympic sport that an American team didn’t medal. Nuss and Kloth, who entered as the odds-on favorites to challenge Ana Patricia and Duda for gold, bowed out in ninth; Cheng and Hughes settled for fifth, the same finishes, respectively, as Chase Budinger and Miles Evans and Andy Benesh and Miles Partain.
Some viewed that lone tournament in Paris, with a unique format and a playing schedule unlike any other, as an indictment of a federation gone awry. It is a view that is both strange and myopic from an American perspective and also a summation of the chief problem with the sport as a whole: Success, both as a pair and a federation and an entire sport, is measured by one tournament every four years.
But Nuss and Kloth’s victory in Doha, their second straight season-ending victory, is yet another reminder that this quad, Olympic medal or not, has been the most successful the USA has seen in the rally scoring era. In the three years since the Tokyo Olympic Games, the USA collected 15, 20, and 18 medals in Challenge or Elite16 events, as well as three victories at the Beach Pro Tour Finals and another at the World Championships. How successful is that? Consider: With an extra year from Rio to Tokyo, Americans combined for 50 medals in three-stars or higher — three less in quantity, despite having an extra season to accumulate more. Quality, too, was assured in the Paris quad. Name a major title or a major annual stop on the Beach Pro Tour — Gstaad, Hamburg, Ostrava, Espinho, Vienna, Rio, World Champs, Beach Pro Tour Finals — and an American has either medaled or won at least once.
The depth of the women has never been greater, as evidenced by Cannon and Kraft’s recent run of now-four consecutive medals at the top level — silver in Gstaad in an all-American final with Nuss and Kloth, bronze in Vienna, silver in Rio de Janeiro, silver in Doha in another all-American final — Molly Shaw and Toni Rodriguez’s full palette of medals in three consecutive Challenges in China, India, and the Philippines, and Kim Hildreth and Teegan Van Gunst beating out fellow Americans Deahna Kraft and Lexy Denaburg for bronze at an Elite16 in Joao Pessoa, Brazil, where both began in the qualifier. The Futures level, too, has become a proving ground for American NCAA talent. Look no further than this weekend’s in Pompano Beach, Florida, where six of the eight semifinalists are American.
Put simply: The United States is as deep and formidable as it has ever been, and it is easy to project it only growing stronger.
It is as silly, then, to call this Olympic quad a failure as it is to call Kristen Nuss lazy. Confusing at first, perhaps, when all the information isn’t immediately apparent, but when a full accounting has been made, Nuss’ shot in the Finals is an apt personification for how this quad went: The United States went for glory.
For three straight years in a brilliant Paris Olympic quad, it found plenty of it.
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