The 2021 season-opening event in Doha shows David Schweiner and Ondrej Perusic are legitimate medal contenders.
Heads were turned a little more than two years ago, at a four-star tournament in Ostrava, when a little-known team from the Czech Republic bruised its way through a fully-loaded field to the finals.
David Schweiner and Ondrej Perusic navigated one of the toughest elimination gauntlets of the year, beating Brazil’s Alison Cerutti and Alvaro Filho, Poland’s Grzegorz Fijalek and Michal Bryl, among other noteworthy pairs, to make the finals before taking the first set off Norway’s Anders Mol and Christian Sorum. There was little they could do wrong. Mol and Sorum would prevail in that final, as they almost always do, but still: the world had to take note of Schweiner and Perusic, a pair of then-24-year-olds who had slowly worked their way up the star system. The silver in Ostrava was their first four-star medal, adding to a pair of silvers in a one-star in Montpellier and a three-star in Mersin in 2018.
The next tournament in which they would make the medal rounds, they would win.
Perusic and Schweiner opened the 2021 season last week in Doha in the most dominant fashion possible, winning 12 of 13 sets, outscoring opponents 267-217. They won their first gold medal as a team, in an undefeated run that appeared, frankly, vaguely Norwegian. Only the hosts, Cherif Samba and Ahmed Tijan, were able to take a set off the Czechs.
Nobody else was close to winning a match.
Even Schweiner was caught off guard.
“We were not expecting this,” the blocker said after a 21-16, 21-19 victory over Brazilians Evandro and Guto in the finals. “I cannot really describe the emotions, the feelings we currently have. It was finally not up and down, it was just higher.”
He was speaking both for himself, and for his federation: the Czech Republic is only getting higher.
