Bara and Maki end season with a superb silver

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Bara and Maki (left) pose with their silver medals on the podium

They were the comeback queens of the Red Bull Beach Arena that couldn’t turn things around in the final – but Barbora Hermannová and Marketa Sluková believed it was a dream come true to end their season with a silver medal at the Beach Volleyball FIVB World Tour Finals.

The duo came close to exiting the tournament in the pool play and were four points behind in the final set of their semifinal on Sunday morning but ended the day with second place on the podium after Agatha Bednarczuk and Duda Santos Lisboa’s straight sets victory.

However, the pair can be proud of an excellent season which has led them to gold medals at their home four-star tournament in Ostrava and the magnificent victory at the A1 Major Vienna presented by Swatch.

“I think it’s pretty awesome,” said Bara afterwards. “We played a really good tournament here and we enjoyed it on the center court even though the Brazilians were really strong today.

“We didn’t find the right buttons against them but we are very proud of what we achieved and the silver medal will be hanging on the wall next to the medals from Ostrava and Vienna for sure. I think we will for sure be happy what we did this season.

“We had the strongest end of the summer season since we teamed up so I think this will be a very big plus for us.”

Marketa felt too many errors helped their opponents when it mattered but she was still thrilled to end the long season with second place and a runners’ up check of 80,000 US Dollars.

“We just made a little more mistakes,” admitted the defender. “Our service was not that efficient so we didn’t put them under pressure. That was the difference. In the second set we started to serve a little better and we were able to close the lead on them but they had some really nice situations on defense and they turned them into points and we didn’t.

“I think the silver is a dream come true. We didn’t know if we would be able to get through pool play so to end up with a silver medal, that’s just amazing. We had a hard week, three of the teams from our Pool ended up all being on the podium. I think the silver medal is a really nice highlight for the end of the season.”