After Paolo Nicolai and Samuele Cottafava, Italian beach volleyball can celebrate the arithmetic certainty of Olympic qualification for Paris 2024 by the female pair composed of Valentina Gottardi and Marta Menegatti. The Italians are currently ninth in the five-circle ranking thanks to the excellent results achieved since 1 July 2022 and have therefore secured the pass for the Games.
“Olympic qualification is a source of enormous satisfaction, both personally and as a team. It’s a feeling built over time. In fact, the path to Paris began a few years ago and is the result of growing results that we have achieved with patience, sacrifices and hard work. The emotion is strong, and for me it is inevitable to think of our first tournament played together, the Sardinia Finals in 2021, when I made my debut on the world circuit. Marta and all the other athletes involved in that tournament were veterans of the Tokyo Olympic Games”, comments Gottardi.
“The exception was me, eighteen years old and present at the event thanks to a wild card. I told myself that I would have to earn my future in beach volleyball with the utmost effort; today I am very proud to have honored the federal project that was born then. We have been preparing for the Olympics for some time and we will face it as always: together, with even more concentration and energy. Qualifying in advance will allow us to work peacefully in the coming months. The goal is to bring this same serenity under the Eiffel Tower,” adds the talented 21-year-old.
So instead Menegatti: “I am very excited for my fourth edition of the Olympic Games. Perhaps this qualification was the most unexpected. I still remember the first tournament I did together with Valentina and since then we have come a long way. We have forged ahead by climbing the world rankings in a very short time. Realistically, at the beginning of our journey I wasn’t thinking about our qualification; usually a new couple in beach volleyball takes a little longer to get going, to assimilate the right mechanisms and therefore to reach a certain solidity, fundamental aspects in a sport like ours. Let’s say that it was all a huge surprise which however has now materialized in this Olympic qualification. We played a lot and had a lot of fun; I hope to face the Games with our usual spirit, living every single moment of a unique experience. We will give our best as we always have from the first day we put our feet in the sand together.”
