Espinho, Portugal, November 15, 2018 - Known as the volleyball capital in Portugal and the home of nine Portuguese sports clubs, Espinho returns to the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour for the third-straight season and the 16th-time overall.
The 2019 men's and women's Espinho Open will be played from July 17-21 on the Praia de Espinho, a 17km long beach that extends south from the Douro estuary.
A seaside resort on the Atlantic Ocean, Espinho is one of the top sites on the FIVB World Tour and ranks behind Gstaad, Switzerland (19 seasons), Klagenfurt, Austria (18), Rio de Janeiro (18) and Marseille, France (16) in staging international beach volleyball events.
The 2019 Espinho Open will break a tie with Berlin and Stavanger, Norway on the list of most popular World Tour sites as all three cites currently rank fifth on the FIVB all-time site listing.
The best finishes by a Portuguese team in Espinho were a 1998 men's fifth by Joao Brenha/Luis Maia and a 2000 women's seventh by Cristina Pereira/Maria Schuller. Both teams rank as the Portugal top beach volleyball pairs in history.
Brenha/Maia, the only men’s or women’s team to win a FIVB World Tour gold medal (1998 Ostende, Belgium and 1999 Moscow, Russia), competed in three Olympics with fourth-place finishes in the Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000 Summer Games.
Pereira and Schuller, who placed ninth at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, are the only Portuguese women’s team to advance to a FIVB World Tour semifinal (2000 in Dalian, China).
Here is a list of past Espinho gold medal teams.
Men1995 - Roberto Lopes/Franco Neto, Brazil
1996 - Mike Dodd/Mike Whitmarsh, United States
1997 - Jan Kvalheim/Bjorn Maaseide, Norway
1998 - Jose Loiola/Emanuel, Brazil
1999 - Loiola/Emanuel, Brazil
2000 - Ze Marco/Ricardo, Brazil
2001 - Loiola/Ricardo, Brazil
2002 - Stein Metzger/Kevin Wong, United States
2003 - Emanuel/Ricardo, Brazil
2004 - Emanuel/Ricardo, Brazil
2005 - Julius Brink/Kjell Schneider, Germany
2006 - Brink/Christoph Dieckmann, Germany
2007 - Emanuel/Ricardo, Brazil
2017 - Vitor Felipe/George Wanderley, Brazil
2018 - Aleksandrs Samoilovs/Janis Smedins, Latvia
Women1995 - Holly McPeak/Nancy Reno, United States
1996 - Sandra Pires/Jackie Silva, Brazil
1997 - Monica Rodrigues/Adriana Samuel, Brazil
1998 - Barbra Fontana/Hanley, United States
1999 - Annette Davis/Jenny Jordan, United States
2000 - Liz Masakayan/Elaine Youngs, United States
2001 - Misty May-Treanor/Kerri Walsh Jennings, United States
2005 - May-Treanor/Walsh Jennings, United States
2007 - Juliana Felisberta/Larissa Franca, Brazil
2018 - Mariafe Artacho/Taliqua Clancy, Australia