Budapest Futures: Likhatskyi Brothers Take First Gold, Bulgaria Reach Historic Best

On the sand court in Budapest there is no lane marked with white chalk, no starting line for the referee to call each athlete into place. There is only sand, wind, and two people standing beside each other for the whole match. And yet, rewatching the footage of the Futures stop on the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour, I recognised the familiar rhythm of the 400 metres: a team loses its opening pool match, then quietly wins five in a row to finish with gold.

The brothers Ivan and Richard Likhatskyi of Ukraine did exactly that. Their first career gold did not come from a perfect play but from the ability to endure a terrible start — something I have seen in young athletes before anyone knows their names.

Every starting line is a Sunday nobody knows the name of. In Budapest, that starting line was the opening pool defeat.

To read this result correctly, it has to be placed on the right tier. Futures is the lowest level of the FIVB-run Beach Pro Tour — a place to accumulate ranking points and experience, not a gathering of the world's leading pairs. Above it sit the Challenger stops, Elite16 and the Finals. That means each medal in Budapest says less about the absolute level of the winner and more about the state of a national programme.

The Budapest stop brought together European pairs, with Ukraine entering several. The Likhatskyi brothers were seeded on prior results; the Bulgarian pair of Mehandzhiyski and Kalchev were also in the highly rated group; Austria's Klemen and Holzinger entered as the fifth seeds.

Men's beach doubles has only two players per team — no bench, no substitutions, no extra time to fix mistakes. Everything happens across two or three sets, and nobody can hide behind a collective tactic. That is why I always check three things before trusting a results sheet: the scoring format, the number of sets in each match, and whether the pair kept the same line-up throughout the tournament.

In Budapest all three were available. The format was the Rally Point System — every rally scores a point regardless of who serves. The decisive matches all ended in two sets. And the pairs kept the same two players from first match to last.

I once spent four months following a 400 metres athlete in Chiang Mai just to write about how he corrected his technique after being disqualified for twice stepping outside his lane. Nobody read that piece. But it taught me a rule I still use: at the lower tiers of sport, the real story lies in the run of matches, not in the medal. Budapest Futures is such a tier.

The final ended 2-0 for the Likhatskyi brothers. Their semi-final was harder — 2-1. The Bulgarian pair Mehandzhiyski and Kalchev won their semi-final 2-0 before reaching the final. Ukraine's second pair, Popov and Tiurin, won the bronze-medal match 2-0. Austria's Klemen and Holzinger, the fifth seeds, reached the semi-finals and stopped there.

Reading these numbers the way a track journalist does, what caught my attention was the streak, not the scores. The Likhatskyi brothers' run of five straight wins after an opening defeat is the most important fact of the whole event. In beach doubles, with only two players and nobody to replace them, losing the first match and then winning five in a row says something about the ability to adjust between matches. That is a kind of data no stopwatch can measure, but the results sheet records it.

I have no figures for service winners, blocks, or perfect-pass rates. There is no official FIVB technical statistics sheet for this Futures stop in the sources I can reach. So any conclusion about “attacking power” or “superior tactics” is controlled speculation. To be blunt: anyone claiming the champions won through a more advanced tactical system is making it up. All we have is the final score.

The second notable point is Ukraine's depth. Two of their pairs won medals — gold for the Likhatskyi brothers, bronze for Popov and Tiurin. For a country outside the beach-volleyball elite such as Brazil or the United States, placing two pairs on the podium at the same stop is a signal about the system, not about luck. Illia Tiurin won bronze on his Beach Pro Tour debut. That is a data point on the youth pipeline, though the sample is far too small to conclude anything.

For Bulgaria, the silver of Mehandzhiyski and Kalchev is the best result in this pair's Beach Pro Tour history, following an earlier bronze at Sveti Vlas. This is the kind of citable, verifiable fact that matters: a career milestone, not an absolute peak. I always place two such numbers side by side, because they tell different stories — the old bronze speaks to reaching the final group, the new silver to going one step further. The distance between those two occasions is a whole season's work for a pair.

Austria is the most interesting case for a counter-argument. They reached the semi-finals as the fifth seeds, meaning the experts rated them highly before the event. They won enough to reach the last four and stopped there. None of their defeats in the data looks like a collapse. That is the kind of result that forces a writer to be careful: a team good enough to be strong, not good enough to cross the final threshold. In athletics I call that the athlete who makes the final and finishes fifth — nobody writes about them, yet they are the true measure of the field.

One point on the Olympic-cycle context should be clear: Futures stops exist to feed the ranking pipeline towards Olympic qualification. They do not decide Olympic places, but they are the first rungs of the ladder. For pairs like the Likhatskyi brothers or the Bulgarians, Budapest's value lies not in the medal but in the points and in the experience of playing decisive matches.

Commercially, this is a practical stop rather than a headline event. There is no major broadcast, no packed stands, no announced sponsorship deals. What it has is ranking points and real matches. And precisely for that reason, it is where I most like to sit quietly and take notes.

There is another angle rarely discussed. Scouting networks and Futures stops both find talent and can turn a medal into a lottery ticket for a whole family. I have seen young athletes of seventeen or eighteen pushed towards distant tournaments simply because one stop left a trace in their file. Most of them go nowhere. But writers tend to remember only those who reach the finish. That is a debt of the trade.

This is where I want to doubt my own storytelling. At the Futures tier, gold is a small event in the global picture. One can write about it as a historic beginning, but the technical truth is that we have no single metric to say the champions were tactically stronger than their opponents. The final score is all we have, and a score cannot distinguish a good tactic from an opponent's mistake.

The second risk is a national-pride narrative running faster than actual capability. A Futures silver does not turn Bulgaria into a beach-volleyball power; it only marks one step forward. I have seen it too many times, in other sports, when a fine result is turned into a false expectation — and false expectation always belongs to the writer, not the athlete. When I wrote about the Thai 400 metres hurdler kneeling and weeping beside the steeplechase pit in Tokyo, what I learned was not how to celebrate a defeat, but how not to impose a meaning the person involved does not accept.

There is a structural point that beach doubles exposes more clearly than athletics: concentrated risk. One pair is the entire team. There is no bench to absorb an injury, a slump in form, a sleepless night. The depth of a national programme is only truly credible when it has more than one pair — and Ukraine, at this stop, showed that, though the sample remains far too small to assert. For most other nations in Budapest, the entire programme rested on exactly two people.

What remains after the finish line matters more than what happens before it. For the Likhatskyi brothers, what remains is a first gold and a question with no answer yet: can they repeat it at a higher tier?

Budapest Futures does not create stars. It records a moment when a few young pairs learn how to win after having lost. Follow beach volleyball long enough and you will see Futures stops drift past each season, most of them forgotten. But for those inside the game, a first gold is never a small detail. The question I leave behind: which youth development programme will turn this moment into a system, rather than a memory?

The crowd's memory is something sport rewrites every season, as long as one person knows how to copy it down.