USA GOLD! Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes win Beach Volleyball World Championships

TLAXCALA, MEXICO — She heard a voice. Clear as day. As if it had come from a person sitting directly next to her.

“Breakthrough is here.”

That’s what Kelly Cheng heard two years ago, after making it into the semifinals of the Sochi four-star with Sarah Sponcil. The voice wasn’t wrong. Quite prescient, in fact. The next day, Cheng and Sponcil won a gold medal, their first as a team, a finish that would all but punch their ticket to the Tokyo Olympic Games.

Two years later, there it was again. Not a voice this time, but something, a feeling, a sensation, something inexplicable but it was there. She knew it, knew it was the same.

“Last time I had a breakthrough moment like this I heard it,” Cheng said. “This time I felt it, felt this sense of peace.”

She first felt it two weeks ago, in Paris. Yet the breakthrough didn’t happen. The opposite, in fact, happened: Cheng and Hughes fell in the quarterfinals for the second straight tournament, “and that’s OK,” Cheng said, “because I think — we can’t see how God intends things to be, so we just talked about staying on the path. We know we’re on the right path and here we are.”

She said this smiling, chilled by a champagne shower, wrapped in an American flag sarong. She said this next to Hughes, irreversible smiles on their faces.

She said this as the winner of the 2023 Beach Volleyball World Championships.

It’s a title that came as hard-earned as any, a 21-16, 24-22 victory over Brazilians Ana Patricia and Duda, a team that had been so indomitable it hadn’t even dropped a set in seven matches in Mexico, a team that hadn’t lost in 19 matches.

It came with drama and theatrics. It came with Cheng’s best blocking performance, six in all, capping a tournament in which she entered the gold-medal match averaging 1.9 blocks per match. It nearly came earlier, too, at 22-21 in the second set. Ana Patricia swung a deep angle swing. A perfect swing.

A swing that was out.

Cheng celebrated. Hughes had never heard her scream like that. A World Championship scream. Then she glanced at the line judge, her flag pointed down, signaling the ball was in. The up ref agreed. Cheng and Hughes challenged. And so the world waited, with bated breath and heart rates reaching dangerously high levels. Thirty seconds later, a 30 seconds that lasted an hour, the replay confirmed the call: Ball was in.

The championship would go on.

It’s a moment that can take the sails out of a team. One moment you’re World Champions. The next, you must side out against the defending world champions, the No. 1-ranked team in the world. Twice, Hughes had a crack at it. Twice, Duda dug it. Only Duda’s second swing was blocked, a perfect move from Cheng, who dragged her left hand into Duda’s seam.

All match long, they had served Ana Patricia. For the most part, it worked. But here, at the most critical point in the tournament, a world championship on the line, they tried Duda, inimitable, nearly perfect Duda.

For a moment, Duda and Hughes locked eyes. Duda knew Hughes was in the angle, just as she knows she has one of the most powerful arms in the world. She challenged Hughes, swinging angle. Up it came, off Hughes’ platform — and then up it came again, as Hughes tried the exact same swing. Only Duda’s dig sprayed over the net, gifting the USA a free ball.

Cheng and Hughes both wanted it. Hughes wanted it for different reasons: For nearly a year, they’d been perfecting their system, one of the most dangerous on-two teams in the world. Cheng is arguably more dangerous as an option threat than she is on her third contact. Hughes waved her off. Cheng spread outside, waiting for the pass she knew would be perfect, the pass that Ana Patricia couldn’t chase down, the pass that would give her an open net opportunity to win the world championship. Win they did, with Cheng turning a line swing that would go untouched.

Delirium.

“For Kelly to crank the option was unbelievable,” Hughes said. “It was just a surreal moment.”

It was a surreal completion of a months-long lull, one that featured the growing pains that must come with tweaking a system, adding new elements, elements that, they knew, would elevate them as a team into the stratosphere they know they can play.

“It’s so satisfying. I think Kelly and I can both say that there were points where we were both frustrated,” Hughes said. “Some practices were tough. We were doing double days, we were doing extra reps, and for it all to come to fruition and pay off, it’s so satisfying, but we’re not even close to scratching the surface of what we can do.”

What that potential might look like will have to wait.

Their coach, Jordan Cheng, has even given them the week off.

“I keep going back and forth from being super excited, very grateful, to crying I’m so happy,” Cheng said. “So proud of all the work we’ve put in. Our support staff to help us peak at the right time, it’s so cool having both of our coaches here. It’s such a cool moment.”

Indeed, it is a cool moment for all USA beach volleyball fans, who have been bereft of a World Championship gold medal since April Ross and Jen Kessy last won it in 2009 in Stavanger, Norway. The win also secures a bid to the 2024 Paris Olympic Games — not that it needed one — all but ending the race with eight months left in it.

“It’s so surreal,” Cheng said. “There was so much stress in that match but so many moments of peace.”

Kristen Nuss, Taryn Kloth make history in Mexico

At peace, too, will be Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth, World Championships rookies who didn’t look the part. They were nearly the ones competing in Sunday’s final match, losing a thriller to Cheng and Hughes in Saturday’s semifinal. Instead, they were to play for bronze, against Australia’s Taliqua Clancy and Mariafe Artacho, Olympic silver medalists who had already vanquished Canada’s Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson.

They nearly upset Nuss and Kloth, too.

A 21-18 opening set win was followed by an 18-16 Australian lead in the second. Three points away from sealing a bronze medal, which would have been the first for Australia since Natalie Cook and Nicole Sanderson won bronze in 2003. But this is Nuss and Kloth. This is the stingiest defensive team in the world, anchored by Nuss and her 134 digs, nearly double that of any other player in the field.

At just the right moment, that defense came alive. A side-out trimmed the deficit to 17-18, an unbelievably-placed cut shot from Nuss to end a long and winding rally tied it at 18-18. A dig to a Kloth option preceded an Australian error, and in a blink, Nuss and Kloth had flipped a harrowing set into a 20-18 lead, one they’d close, 21-19.

To give Nuss and Kloth extra life is a mighty dangerous proposition. Out they roared, to a 4-1 lead in the third, a lead that would only be built upon and extended, all the way to 15-8.

“What just happened?” Nuss asked, rhetorically, amidst a swarm of hats and shirts and towels and flags and phones and anything else that could possibly be signed. “Wow. What is this? What is this?”

What this is, is history.

The last time the USA won a bronze medal at the World Championships, when Liz Masakayan and Elaine Youngs defeated Brazil in France in 1999, Nuss was just a year old and Kloth was 2.

It’s also the last year multiple American women’s teams have medaled in a World Championship.

“When the ball hit the ground, I was just like ‘Thank goodness,’ ” Nuss said. “And Taryn’s amazing.”