Budapest Futures: The Likhatskyi Brothers Built Their Gold on a Pool-Play Defeat

The final score in Budapest was 2-0 for the Likhatskyi brothers, but their tournament began with a defeat. Ivan and Richard lost their opening pool match at the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour Futures stop, then quietly won five matches in a row to take gold. In beach volleyball, a team is two people and nobody can be substituted; a pool loss kills no one, but it forces the pair to fix something very specific before the knockout rounds. At three in the morning in Nagoya, I opened the recording again and wrote exactly one line in my notebook: winning five straight matches in the doubles format rarely comes from hitting harder, it comes from changing the serve and changing the receiver. The ball does not cry, but the storyteller does.

The Futures tier of the Beach Pro Tour is the lowest level of the professional beach system run by FIVB, sitting beneath the Challenge and Elite16 stops. The prize money is modest and the ranking points are small, which is precisely why it matters: a pair that wants to climb into Challenge events has to accumulate points at stops like Budapest. Pool play followed by knockout, under the rally point system where every rally awards a point regardless of who serves, makes errors in the first contact far more expensive than they are indoors. A court 16 by 8 metres, two people covering all of it, no libero, no substitutes, no long intervals. Sand, sun, wind, and one ball.

In Budapest, seeding followed previous results. The Bulgarian pair Mehandzhiyski and Kalchev arrived highly rated and repaid that rating with four straight wins to reach the final. It was their best result in Beach Pro Tour history, following a bronze medal at Sveti Vlas. On the Ukrainian side, besides the Likhatskyi brothers, there was the pair of Popov and Tiurin; they won their bronze-medal match 2-0, and for Illia Tiurin it was a medal on debut. The Austrian pair Klemen and Holzinger reached the semifinals as fifth seeds and stopped there.

Since 2026, when I first sat in the sports department of Belgrade Television, I have kept one habit: reading a tournament through the things organisers do not publish. The Budapest Futures stop released no official technical data set — no serve point rate, no perfect pass rate, no successful block count. Viewers get the scores. And scores, if you look long enough, still tell a story. I do not count matches. I count the stories allowed on air.

Beach doubles has a fixed structure that television viewers tend to overlook: one blocker, one defender. The blocker reads the setter's direction and chooses line or angle; the defender stands behind and is responsible for every ball that passes beyond the blocker's reach. Under the rally point system, points come from two sources: holding your own side-out rhythm when serving, and breaking the opponent's rhythm when they serve. A 2-0 final tells you the champions held their rhythm and found one stretch long enough to break their opponent's. There is nothing mystical in that, only repetition accurate enough to be boring.

The Likhatskyi brothers' semifinal ended 2-1. The third set in beach volleyball is where everything is exposed: only 15 points, every rally heavy as a decision. The pair that wins the third set is usually not the pair playing prettier volleyball, it is the pair committing fewer unforced errors. At the Futures level, the technical gap between pairs is narrow, which makes unforced errors the largest single variable on the scoreboard. Losing the opening pool match and then winning five straight fits exactly into that logic: they did not need to invent tactics, they needed to stop handing the opponent free points.

The Bulgarian pair took a different road. Mehandzhiyski and Kalchev won four matches in a row, including a 2-0 semifinal. That is the streak of a pair playing through serve power and quick attacks, a style that demands a solid physical base and stability on the second contact. In the final they lost 0-2. Their best result in Beach Pro Tour history remains silver, and that exposes a familiar paradox of the Futures tier: a pair can dominate for the whole event, but one match in which the serve loses its bite and the entire structure behind it collapses.

Behind Popov and Tiurin's bronze medal there is a detail I consider more important than the 2-0 scoreline: Illia Tiurin made his debut at this level. A young attacker entered the professional system with a medal, while his partner carried most of the pressure on first contact. That is how a national programme builds its second tier: the strongest pair hunts points, the newer pair gains experience and brings home medals while learning the trade. I thought I was telling their story, and it turned out they were telling mine, a person who also entered the profession through a broadcast nobody remembers.

The Austrian pair Klemen and Holzinger is the opposite case. Fifth seeds, semifinals, and then a stop. They did not lose because they were weak; they stopped because in the semifinal the opponent already had enough data to target the blur in their defensive system. Beach volleyball does not let you hide a player. A pair that goes deep in one event gets studied in the next, and the price of reaching a semifinal is becoming somebody else's homework.

It is worth saying plainly where the analysis hits its limits. The Budapest stop published no detailed technical data, so any reasoning about serve point rates or blocking efficiency sits at medium confidence at best. I have no interest in constructing a fake statistical table to look professional. What is certain: 2-0 scorelines appeared in the final and the bronze-medal match, while 2-1 appeared only in the semifinal. At a stop with a dense daily schedule, the gap between winning and losing usually lies in the ability to hold first-contact quality while tired, and no statistics table measures that.

This is where I want to say what the results page will not. A medal at the Futures tier is usually told as a turning point, when in reality it is closer to paperwork: ranking points to enter a Challenge, prize money enough to cover travel, and sometimes a pair has to split and re-partner to optimise points. Every contract is a farewell stamped with a number, and that holds even for beach pairs who have no contract at all, only a chain of results and a plane ticket.

There is one more thing. At the same Futures stop, the women's bracket runs in parallel, under the same rules, the same ranking scale, the same prize framework. The broadcast time given to them is far thinner. I have followed women's sport for four decades, I am no longer surprised, but I still write it down each time. Women's volleyball does not need rescuing; it needs someone willing to watch long enough.

And the hypothesis of new tactics should be discarded. The Budapest stop showed no sign of tactical innovation. At this level, what gets rewarded is execution: serving at the right player, blocking in the right direction, and not donating points. Execution does not make headlines, but it pays for hotel rooms.

What is changing is not the gold medal of the Likhatskyi brothers, but the fact that Ukraine had two pairs on the podium at a single stop, and that Bulgaria reached a Beach Pro Tour final for the first time. For pairs paying their own hotel bills, the distance between silver and a Challenge entry is a few dozen points. Is Budapest the start of a new cycle, or just a fine week on the sand? At 58, I no longer remember the score; I remember the face of the person who touched the ball last.