2024-05-02 01:13:33
At the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games, Točs won a very respectable fourth place in a pair with Mārtinas Pļaviņas, however, after this competition, the duo announced their separation. According to Točs, such a decision was made by his teammate at the time.
“She also said that she no longer wants to continue this cooperation. When playing together for a long time, there are emotions, crossings and it becomes difficult for someone to stand the other. The characters are different and not all get along well. It happened to us without any resentment,” the athlete remembers, also concluding that the duet’s performance was already declining at that time. He says that it was probably the knowledge that this was the last tournament together that helped him play so well in Tokyo. “Many divorces were not fully understood. I took it to mean that the particular stage had passed. You don’t always have to look for reasons. If the other person feels this way, you have to accept it and you have to look further, with which partners you can start a new phase.”
For the next two seasons, both Točs and Pļaviņš mostly played together with the best young athletes of Latvia, but they failed to stand out at the international level with high results. Last fall, another Latvian duo, Aleksandrs Samoilovs and Jānis Šmēdiņš, announced their breakup after 11 seasons of cooperation. Although it was initially announced that Šmēdins, the multiple best striker of the World Tour, was ending his career, a few months later it became known that he would still continue to play, doing it in a pair with Toča.
“I think that he sat down at home and realized that he will not sit on the sidelines. We often think that the other life is better, but the reality is understood only when we enjoy it. How many people here have not heard that people say – everything is fed up, disgusted, wants to leave. He goes abroad, lives for a couple of days and is already coming back. In addition, you cannot get sports emotions and adrenaline anywhere else. This is definitely missing in a peaceful life,” Točs tells in an interview about Šmēdins’ decision to continue his career and emphasizes that Jānis was the one who showed the initiative to start playing together. “Jānis can still play. We have realized that even now, when we are not showing our best game, we can also win. There is potential to work further.”
The duo made their first joint starts this month. First, in the “Challenge” tournament in Mexico, they overcame the qualification with two victories, but lost in both matches of the main tournament, while last week in the competition of the same category in China, they failed in the first qualification match. The main goal of all Latvian beach volleyball couples at the moment is the internal selection competition for the finals of the CEV Nations Cup scheduled for May. Three tournaments are expected in the selection, in which the six strongest duos will participate. On the other hand, the final of the Nations Cup will take place in Jurmala in mid-June, and tickets to the Paris Olympic Games will be distributed there. This is the only opportunity for Latvian men’s couples to qualify for the most important competition of the quadrennial. Edgars Toč, however, calls on the public not to exaggerate the importance of the Olympic Games.
“If an athlete claims that the Olympics are above everything and that preparation for the Olympic start is his whole life, I don’t believe it. The life of an athlete is much broader. If you play at the highest level, you need to prove yourself again during the whole season, in the World Cup, in the World Championship. The Olympic Games are held once every four years. Yes, I do not deny, important competitions, but on the overall time scale it is a very short stage, in which you can be affected by an extremely large number of side circumstances and factors. In my opinion, the Olympic Games are like a stress ball, in which you have to try to show a decent performance on the court against all that background,” says the beach volleyball player.
“Our audience is very aggressive. And this is also understandable, because there are as many resources as there are in the country. If an athlete does not achieve a result within four years, everyone thinks that he is just sitting in a good country bread and doing nothing. I myself believe that staying firmly at the highest level of the world in your sport is much more valuable than shooting at one Olympic Games. Yes, we finished fourth in Tokyo, but if you look at how we did, it was much, much harder to hold the line throughout the season. There is also a clear opposite example with Jānis and Saša, who were at the top of the World Tour for several seasons, which is an incredible achievement, but in the end, it did not happen together at the Olympics. Does that make the rest of their outstanding achievements any less valuable?” asks Toch.
Read the entire interview with Edgars Toča in the magazine Sports Newspaper in the April issue, which can still be found in the best press outlets for the last week.
2024-05-02 01:13:33