The Brasilia Elite, the third Elite event on the 2025 Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour, is set to get underway on Wednesday in the Brazilian capital. The first day of action in the men’s competition will offer a single round of eight qualification matches, while the 24-team main draw will serve off on Thursday. The entry list features a strong line-up of men’s teams, including eight of the top 10 active pairs in the FIVB World Ranking.
Elite16 - Brasilia, Brazil - 2025
Vikings to go for more in Brasilia
Qualifier action set to get men’s tournament underway on Wednesday
Published 07:34, 16 Apr 2025
- Watch the Brasilia Elite on VBTV
The main draw bracket is headed by Tokyo 2020 Olympic champions and Paris 2024 Olympic bronze medalists Anders Mol & Christian Sorum of Norway, currently ranked number two in the world. The Beachvolley Vikings have won five of the last six Beach Pro Tour events they took part in, including the Doha Finals in December. They seem to maintain their excellent shape at the start of the new season as they swept last week’s Saquarema Elite without suffering a single loss in the seven matches played. Mol & Sorum will lead Pool A and will start their campaign against a team emerging from Wednesday’s qualifiers. In the other Pool A first-leg match, 13th-seeded Chilean Olympians Marco Grimalt & Esteban Grimalt, the world’s current number 11 team, will take on Australian Olympians Mark Nicolaidis & Izac Carracher, seeded 12th in the Brasilia main draw.
Trending Argentinean brothers Nicolas Capogrosso & Tomas Capogrosso are seeded second and will lead Pool B. Their steady performances in recent tournaments have earned them two high-level silver medals, at November’s Rio de Janeiro Elit16 and at last month’s Quintana Roo Elite, and have lifted them to a team-high fourth place in the World Ranking. The other Pool B opener will feature an all-Dutch duel between the new teams of former partners Steven van de Velde and Matthew Immers, who took silver in Brasilia last year, with Alexander Brouwer and Ruben Penninga, respectively.
The world’s number one team, reigning Olympic champions David Ahman & Jonatan Hellvig of Sweden, seeded third in Brasilia, will headline Pool C. Following last year’s amazing victorious run of five consecutive high-level golds, crowned with the Paris 2024 title, the Swedish jump-setters have not been able to top any podiums and must be hungry for more trophy victories. So they will certainly do their best to improve on the second place they took in Saquarema last week. Their pool also features the world’s number 16 team of Mathias Berntsen & Hendrik Mol from Norway and the recently formed Italian pairing of Samuele Cottafava & Gianluca Dal Corso.
One of the Pool D opening matches will offer an interesting clash between US Olympians Miles Partain & Andrew Benesh, who will make their first Beach Pro Tour appearance after Paris 2024, and last year’s Brasilia Elite16 winners, Brazilian Olympians Evandro Oliveira & Arthur Mariano, ranked seventh in the world. In the mean time, awaiting for their first main draw opponent in the pool will be Dutch heavyweights Stefan Boermans & Yorick de Groot, ranked fifth in the world and seeded fourth in Brasilia, who took the bronze last week in Saquarema.
Pool E is one of the pools that will feature two teams from the qualifiers. They will face the heavy task of challenging fifth-seeded Noslen Diaz & Jorge Alayo of Cuba, who recently won their first ever Beach Pro Tour gold, at the Quintana Roo Elite, and the strong Latvian duo of well-seasoned three-time Olympian and London 2012 bronze medalist Martins Plavins and rising star Kristians Fokerots, who are the reigning European champions.
Awaiting for their first rivals in Pool F are sixth-seeded Brazilians Adrielson Dos Santos & Arthur Da Silva and seventh-seeded Polish Olympians Michal Bryl & Bartosz Losiak.
The men’s qualifiers, set to get underway at 11:30 local time (14:30 UTC), will also feature some top-notch teams like American Olympians Miles Evans & Chase Budinger, currently number 13 in the world, Quintana Roo Elite bronze medalists Chaim Schalk & James Shaw, also of the United States, Portugal’s Joao Pedrosa & Hugo Campos, who recently made the podium at the Yucatan Challenge, or Swedish rising stars Jacob Holting Nilsson & Elmer Andersson, as well as a solid mix of Brazilian duos to be heavily supported by the home crowd in Brasilia.
Once the main draw serves off on Thursday, modified pool play format will determine the three teams per pool that will advance to the elimination rounds, which will eventually lead to Sunday’s medal matches in Brasilia.
