GOLD AGAIN! Kristen Nuss, Taryn Kloth join rarified air with Beach Pro Tour Finals win

The conversation had to be had. One of the most difficult of Taryn Kloth’s life.

The 6-foot-4 blocker and her partner, the diminutive Kristen Nuss, had already assembled the most decorated season in American beach volleyball since Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross’ nine-medal haul in 2016. Already in 2023, Nuss and Kloth had won a bronze medal at the World Championships. Climbed the rankings to No. 2 in the world. Put the globe on notice that, yes, a 5-foot-6 defender — a “chaparrita,” as Nuss was dubbed in Mexico during the World Championships — is far more than an adorable gimmick at the sport’s highest level.

Yet in this week’s Beach Pro Tour Finals in Doha, the grand finale event of the season, the one with $800,000 on the line, one of the most prestigious tournaments on the calendar, they were flat. Twice, they’d been swept in pool play, putting them on the brink of not advancing to the playoffs for the first time of their careers.

Then came the chat.

“One of the toughest and brutally honest conversations,” Kloth recalled of their team meeting between their second and third matches of pool play. “But now I can say I am very grateful for it.”

If you can quantify gratitude, this week’s comes in the form of $150,000, the biggest paycheck available in beach volleyball and the largest of their individual careers. Whatever was said in that meeting, the candor of the discussion elevated Nuss and Kloth’s game on the court to levels at which they had never before played. In the four matches after their talk, they didn’t drop a single set, outscoring their opponents by 45 points. They knocked off the teams seeded No. 6 (Katja Stam and Raisa Schoon), 5 (Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson), 3 (Mariafe Artacho and Taliqua Clancy) and 8 (Cinja Tillmann and Svenja Muller). They knocked off World Champions and Olympic medalists.

And they made it look easy.

Their 21-17, 21-14 sweep of Tillmann and Muller in the gold medal match Saturday was clinical, a nearly flawless affair in which they provided no margin for error for the Germans.

“Wild ride indeed,” Kloth said of the season and, in a fitting microcosm of that season, the Beach Pro Tour Finals. “It was definitely a progression but we had so many highs and lows. There are so many different memories that we went back to and we said ‘We really learned in this moment.’ Sometimes we celebrated and sometimes we had to be sad and sometimes we had to work through everything. A great long season.”

The lows were, as great teams do, limited to an awfully high bar. Not once did Nuss and Kloth finish outside the top 10 in 2023, an accomplishment made all the more impressive when considering the fact that they began the year in the qualifiers of Elite16s, nearly losing their first match of the year to fellow Americans Savvy Simo and Toni Rodriguez. Two gold medals in their first four events set the tone that, while their rookie season was magnificent, their second year as professionals was trending to be nothing less than special.

Seven times did Nuss and Kloth stand atop the podium, including in four of their final five tournaments, joining the rarified air of Walsh Jennings and Ross as the most decorated season in nearly a decade for an American duo.

“That is just absolutely unreal,” Nuss said. “We love, we take so much pride representing our country so to be in that category with those names, I think everyone in the beach community knows those names, it’s just amazing. It’s a credit to the work ethic that we put in and our coach back home, thanks Drew [Hamilton] and just al the support we get. Just those names — wow.”

Wow is an apt one word-summation of this season, not just for Nuss and Kloth, but for the USA women as a whole. The two biggest tournaments of the year were claimed by American teams, first Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes at the World Championships, now Nuss and Kloth at the Beach Pro Tour Finals, keeping the title on USA soil after Cheng and Hughes won gold in 2022. Those four aforementioned names comprise two of the top three teams in the world rankings, bested only by bronze medalists Ana Patricia Silva and Duda Lisboa of Brazil.

“We call it TKN Nation because it really is a Nation,” Nuss said of the support back home in Louisiana. “Everyone back home, Louisiana, South Dakota, we thank you for waking up and supporting us, and go USA.”

The men’s final was also won by a young and surging team in Sweden’s David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig, whose rise through the ranks has been as spectacular as it has been entertaining.

The Swedish Jumpsetters, as they have come to be known, stunned Norway’s Anders Mol and Christian Sorum in straight sets, 21-16, 21-17 in the third gold medal meeting of the season between the two. It marks the fourth gold medal of the year for Sweden, five when including a second consecutive European Championship. Mol and Sorum’s three gold medals are, incredibly, their lowest since 2018, when they stormed onto the scene with three consecutive wins, although it’s more than worth noting that they won eight medals in nine events. Bronze went to Brazil’s George Wanderley and Andre Loyola, who swept Qatar’s Cherif Samba and Ahmed Tijan, 21-17, 21-17.

“It’s always super tough against Norway,” Ahman said afterwards. “They are almost impossible to beat so we had to play our best.”