Budapest Futures: The Likhatskyi Brothers Win After a Five-Match Streak

In Budapest, a Futures stop of the Beach Pro Tour has no stand large enough to be called a stadium. Just a few rows of plastic seats, a net strung between two steel posts, and the sound of sand being kicked up every time someone throws themselves down to save a ball. I sat at the edge of the court and counted — not spectators, but the pairs still standing. Sixteen pairs on the opening morning. Three on the podium on the final night. The distance between those two counts is an entire season compressed into four days.

I have grown used to counting. There was a time I counted the women appearing in coverage of the men's World Cup, and the tally came back smaller than the number of goals in a single group stage. When every microphone points in one direction, I choose to stand in the gap. Budapest is one such gap: a tournament that, if you don't go looking for it, you will never know existed.

The World Beach Pro Tour is layered. At the top sits Elite16, where names from Brazil, the United States and Norway trade points in front of thousands. Below that come Challenge, then Futures — the lowest tier, where young pairs, national teams still laying foundations, and players fresh out of the indoor game come to collect ranking points and international experience. Futures is not glamorous. No major broadcast, no LED boards, no pre-built interview area. Yet this is where the first medals of a career are handed out.

Futures points still count toward the FIVB ranking system. For countries trying to build a beach volleyball program almost from zero, this is the only stage they can reach in the early phase. And beach volleyball differs in one fundamental way that indoor viewers often forget: each team has only two players. No substitutes, no bench to fix mistakes, no one to cover when a partner slumps. A good pair means two people who understand each other without looking. A bad pair means two people standing on the same court playing two different matches.

Budapest showed both faces clearly.

The champions were two Ukrainian brothers, Ivan and Richard Likhatskyi. How they reached the gold is more telling than the gold itself. They lost their opening pool match. In a tournament where each pair plays only a few pool matches, an opening defeat is usually enough to push you out of contention. But from that low point they won five straight matches — an unusually long streak at Futures level, where pairs are rarely stable enough to hold form across several days. They won the semifinal 2-1, a match that went to a third set. They won the final 2-0, far more cleanly than the semifinal.

What stands out is not that they won, but that they won along a rising curve — steadier the deeper they went. In beach volleyball, where the body is worn down match after match under the sun, winning the final more easily than the semifinal is a rare signal. It suggests this pair was not only fit but capable of adjusting: after the opening loss, they found how to position, how to divide the court, when to commit to the decisive swing.

Their opponents in the final were the Bulgarian pair Mehandzhiyski and Kalchev. They arrived in Budapest on a four-match winning streak to reach the final. They lost it, but this silver is the best result in their Beach Pro Tour history. Before this, they had a bronze at Sveti Vlas, an event on Bulgarian soil. In other words, this was the first time they cleared a ceiling they had built themselves.

For third place, another Ukrainian pair — Popov and Tiurin — won the bronze match 2-0. Notably, Illia Tiurin was making his debut at this level. A country with two pairs on the podium at an international event, one of them a debutant, is the sign of a development program running on schedule — not a one-off stroke of luck. Beach volleyball cannot survive on a single pair carrying a whole sport. One good pair is a phenomenon. Two is a system.

The Austrian pair, Klemen and Holzinger, entered as the fifth seeds and reached the semifinals. They stopped there. For a fifth seed, a semifinal is a reasonable result, not a surprise — but not a breakthrough either. They are the event's measuring stick: good enough to eliminate many opponents, not yet good enough to pass the strongest. In beach volleyball, seeds reflect accumulated results, and a fifth seed stopping in the semifinals shows the seeding at this level still tracks fairly closely with competitive reality.

This is where I have to say something result reports usually skip. We know the scores, the streaks, the seeds. But we know almost nothing about how those matches unfolded. No ace rate, no perfect-pass rate, no successful block count, no distribution of attack points between the two hitters. Not one FIVB technical statistic for this event was published alongside the results.

So when someone says the Likhatskyi brothers won on character, or the Bulgarians lost on nerves, they are telling a story, not analyzing a match. Character is only visible through numbers: ace rate in the third set, perfect-pass rate when trailing, unforced errors in the decisive rallies. Without that data, every compliment is speculation.

Based on my experience watching beach matches, there is a more reasonable hypothesis — and I am clear that it is a hypothesis. With 2-0 scorelines in the final and the bronze match, plus the long streaks, it is likely the winning pairs imposed their rhythm through aggressive serving and quick combinations — exactly the standard style of modern beach volleyball. There is no evidence of a new tactic appearing. That does not make the medals less valuable. It simply means that at Futures level, teams win by executing the basics correctly, not by inventing something new.

One more detail about the rules is worth noting here. Beach volleyball now uses the rally point system — every rally awards a point regardless of which side serves. That system makes each error more costly, and it rewards pairs that stay stable across a whole match rather than exploding for a few rallies. Seen that way, the Likhatskyi brothers' five-match streak means more than a lucky run: they had to keep their error rate low across four days.

And here is my counter-intuitive view. We tend to treat Futures events as the bottom rung — a place to collect points and move on. But looking closely at Budapest, I see the opposite. At the top tier, pairs know each other too well, are too professional, to the point that every match becomes a contest of polished patterns. At Futures, players are still learning to play together under real pressure. It is events like Budapest that forge a pair — not Elite16. No one puts these matches on air, so they exist only for those who genuinely go looking.

For Bulgarian volleyball, the silver in Budapest is more than a result. It is the first milestone showing the country can produce a pair that reaches the final of a Beach Pro Tour event. Such a milestone usually carries consequences beyond the court: investment, scholarships, and young players who look at it and believe the path is real.

One pair began by losing its opening pool match, then won five to take the title. Another won four to surpass its own previous best for the first time. A debutant walked away with bronze. None of those three stories happened at an event with packed stands. They happened at a tournament that, if I had not sat there counting, no one would retell.

In beach volleyball, each team has only two players, and each must trust that the other will be in the right place at the right time. That trust is built over thousands of training sessions, not one lucky night. Budapest awarded medals to the pairs who built it — and gave them a few ranking points to keep going.

I don't know which of them will reach an Elite16 in the coming years. But I know the road starts here, and it starts with matches no one broadcasts.

I don't just report the match; I report on the people ranked below the scoreline.