March 9, 2024: Canada’s Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson will bring home a silver medal from the first Elite 16 tournament of the year after a 0-2 loss (18-21, 18-21) to Bárbara Seixas and Carol Salgado of Brazil in today’s final.
“It was a hard-fought week of great competition. It feels great to be back on tour playing against the best,” said Humana-Paredes. “We had a tough pre-season preparing for this, so we’re happy to see the things we worked on in action. A big team effort! We would have loved a better showing in the finals but the positive is we have a lot of good to take back home and work on.”
The field in Doha, Qatar, was packed with top-ranking teams. Canada is currently ranked fourth in the world.
Yesterday, Canada defeated number-one ranked Eduarda Santos Lisboa (Duda) & Ana Patricia Ramos of Brazil in the quarterfinals and then in the semis, Melissa/Brandie beat Anastasija Samoilova and Tina Graudina of Latvia 2-1 to advance.
Today, Hughes/Cheng of USA, reigning world champions who are already qualified for Paris 2024, won the bronze-medal match over the Latvian team.
Humana-Paredes and Wilkerson, both of Toronto, are in a good position to qualify for the 2024 Olympics. The 17 highest ranked teams according to the beach volleyball Olympic ranking (based on the best twelve performances as a team for the period from January 01, 2023 to June 09, 2024) secure one spot each for their country at the Paris Games.
Beach volleyball rankings: https://en.volleyballworld.com/beachvolleyball/world-ranking/women
Full Doha results: https://bit.ly/3TphcRo
Volleyball Canada Media contact:
Jackie Skender
jskender@volleyball.ca
Mobile: 1.613.794.7676