It had been a long time since Emily Stockman had competed.
“May as well make it exciting, right?” she said from the Hotel Ezdan, in Doha, Qatar.
Indeed, it had been more than a year since Stockman and her partner, Kelley Kolinske, had competed on the World Tour. Sixteen months had passed since their last Olympic qualification event, in Qinzhou, China in the fall of 2018.
That’s a long time for two of the most competitive athletes in the United States. So if excitement was what they were looking for, excitement is precisely what they got.
In Doha, the first event women have ever been able to compete in beach volleyball in Qatar, Stockman and Kolinske played six matches, with three in a row going the full three sets. They prevailed over Russia’s Mariia Bocharova and Aleksandra Genenko, 16-21, 21-19, 15-11 to win their pool. Then they did so again, winning a thriller over fellow Americans Kerri Walsh Jennings and Brooke Sweat, 21-11, 24-26, 17-15, in one of the longest matches of the entire tournament. To three they’d go again, in the ensuing quarterfinals, against Russia’s Ksenia Dabhiza and Daria Rudykh, winning 21-13, 14-21, 16-14 in a topsy turvy, seesaw of a match.
That win put Stockman and Kolinske in the medal rounds, where they hadn’t been since June of 2018, when they won a silver medal in Warsaw, Poland, winning seven matches to get there.
There would be no silver medal in Doha. April Ross and Alix Klineman, on their way to winning gold, handed Stockman and Kolinske their first loss of the 2021 season, 21-15, 21-16. Brazil’s Agatha and Duda would hand them their second, 21-13, 21-14, extinguishing their hopes of a medal in Qatar.
But a fourth was still, in many ways, a mission accomplished for Stockman and Kolinske; they moved up in the Olympic race, adding 560 points to their Tokyo efforts. They improved their seeding for the following tournaments, a three-event series in Cancun on back-to-back weekends in April.
It had been a long time since they competed.
They made it quite exciting, all right.
