You never want to see a pair of Chasing Gold teams play one another, but it’s a bit of an inevitability in this sport. Draws are draws, and they’ll happen, as it did on Friday afternoon in Cancun, when Kelly Claes and Sarah Sponcil met Emily Stockman and Kelley Kolinske in the first round of pool play of the second Cancun Bubble event.
On the one hand, it’s a guarantee for one team to win and move on from pool. On the other, we’d love to see them both move on and maybe meet in the finals. Alas, we cannot direct such things.
It was Claes and Sponcil, the youngest team in this Olympic race, who won, 21-19, 21-11, in an impressive feat after several of them, beginning with Wednesday’s country quota. Theirs is no easy road, Claes and Sponcil. On Wednesday, they had to beat, once more, Sara Hughes and Emily Day in the country quota. Then they had to win another match, against Japan, to make the main draw, which preceded their bout with Kolinske and Stockman.
All just to break pool.
Such is life on the World Tour.
Those three wins put Sponcil and Claes in an excellent position in this second event. A win over the Netherlands’ Raisa Schoon and Katja Stam would give them a bye in the elimination rounds, an enormous advantage when really only fifths or better will aid them in this Olympic race.
They play at 10 a.m. central on Saturday.
Kolinske and Stockman are now in a win-or-go-home scenario for the remainder of the tournament. They will see Australians Mariafe Artacho and Taliqua Clancy at noon central time to break pool.
On the men’s side, Tri Bourne and Trevor Crabb had a momentous victory over Italians and 2016 Olympic silver medalists Daniele Lupo and Paolo Nicolai. That win guaranteed them to break pool, even with a loss to Poland in the second round.
Bourne and Crabb, who also emerged from the country quota and qualifier, will now see Russians and World Champs Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Oleg Stoyanovskiy in the first round of elimination play at 3 p.m. central time.
